New riots rock Paris suburbs
Foreign Desk Report

VILLIERS LE BEL—A second night of riots by youths in a Paris suburb left more than 80 police injured, buildings gutted and France on Tuesday facing heightened tensions in towns north of the capital.
Late into the night, around 100 young men again hurled petrol bombs and bricks at police in the town of Villiers le Bel, where on Sunday two teenagers were killed in a motorbike collision with a police car.
Faced with the worst eruption of urban violence since the riots of 2005, President Nicolas Sarkozy was to chair a special meeting on the unrest on Wednesday, after returning from a state visit to China.
The president was also to meet the families of the victims, aged 15 and 16, at the Elysee palace Wednesday morning.
Monday night’s violence left several buildings damaged by fire in Villiers, just north of Paris, including a tax office, a supermarket, a library and a nursery school, as well as 63 vehicles. Six people were arrested during the troubles, which lasted about six hours, police said.
A report from Le Monde newspaper described boys as young as 13 taking orders from their elders to torch buildings and forming battle ranks against the police, vowing to “do in” a “pig” — a police officer.
Authorities said guns were used against police, whose unions described the violence as worse than the rioting that hit hundreds of French cities in November 2005 — also sparked by the deaths of two youths.
According to police figures, 82 officers were injured Monday night, four of them seriously after being hit by buckshot from hunting weapons. The Synergie police union said the youths were using “urban guerrilla” tactics.
“Two things are cause for anxiety: signs that the violence is spreading to neighbouring areas, which have already had their share of burned cars, and the almost systematic use of fire-arms against police,” said Douhane Mohamed of the union. “We are coming close to a catastrophe with the use of firearms against police,” said another police union UNSA.
Smaller outbreaks of violence also flared in five other high-immigration neighbourhoods of the north Paris suburbs, not far from the starting-point of the 2005 riots. Prime Minister Francois Fillon visited the scene Tuesday and announced a beefed up security presence for the night to come.
“While justice is taking its course, nothing can justify the violence that took place last night. These acts are unacceptable, they are intolerable. People who fire guns at police are criminals and will be treated as such,” he said. An initial investigation appeared to confirm the police version of Sunday’s incident, according to which the two teenagers — neither wearing a crash helmet — were riding a motorbike that careered into their car.
But relatives of the two youths and some other local people appeared convinced that the police had caused the accident and fled the scene without treating the victims.
Police and politicians say the French suburbs remain a “tinderbox” two years after the 2005 riots, which exposed France’s failure to integrate its large black and Arab population, the children and grandchildren of immigrants from its African colonies.
“This is no place for human beings to live,” said local resident Boniface Gabo, pointing up at his grimy tower block. “Make no mistake, every hundred kids who grow up here are a hundred lost kids.”
The main opposition Socialists, while appealing for calm, accused the right-wing governments of Sarkozy and his predecessor Jacques Chirac of “abandoning” the suburbs to their fate.
But Nadine Morano, spokeswoman for Sarkozy’s Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) warned “there is no magic wand.” “It is going to take us a generation to transform things in these difficult neighbourhoods — housing, jobs, security.”