PARIS — French prosecutors on Thursday urged that a police officer be placed under investigation for voluntary homicide after the deadly shooting of a 17-year-old driver set off violent riots in more than a dozen cities overnight, with protesters burning cars, lighting buildings on fire and setting off fireworks for the second day in a row.
President Emmanuel Macron convened a crisis meeting after the unrest. In comments broadcast by French television at the start of the meeting on Thursday, he called the violent protests “absolutely unjustifiable” and appealed for calm after the death of the teenager, who has been identified only as Nahel M.
Gérald Darmanin, France’s interior minister, said that 150 people had been arrested overnight after the wave of unrest, and that town halls, schools and police stations had been set on fire or attacked. He called it “a night of intolerable violence against symbols of the Republic.”
Police stations were vandalized or targeted with fireworks in cities including Trappes, near Paris, and Rouen, in the north. In Clamart, a Paris suburb, a tramway was briefly set ablaze. » | Aurelien Breeden, Reporting from Paris | Thursday, June 29, 2023
