France to impose curfews as rioting spreads

FRANCE announced plans yesterday to impose curfews on rundown suburbs hit by violence to try to halt almost two weeks of unrest in which one man has been killed, police said yesterday.

Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin promised a firm line against rioters after violence hit a new level on Sunday night.

Under growing pressure from opponents to end the violence, Villepin said: "Wherever it is necessary, prefects will be able to impose a curfew."

He said the cabinet would take the required steps to empower the prefects under a 1955 law at a special cabinet meeting today called by President Jacques Chirac.

Several governments have urged their citizens to be careful in France, as violence spread to Belgium and possibly Germany.

Mr Chirac, in private comments more conciliatory than his warnings yesterday that rioters would be punished, acknowledged France had failed to integrate the French-born children of Arab and black African immigrants in poor suburbs who have been taking part in the violence, according to Latvian President Vaira Vike-Freiberga, who met the French leader yesterday.

She said: "Chirac deplored the fact that in these neighbourhoods there is a ghettoisation of youths of African or North African origin and recognised the incapacity of French society to fully accept them."

Mr Chirac said unemployment runs at 40% in some neighbourhoods, four times the national rate, Ms Vike-Freiberga said.

Vandals burned more than 1,400 vehicles, and clashes around the country left 36 police injured, setting a new high for nightly violence since rioting began on October 27, police chief Michel Gaudin said.

Australia, Britain, Germany and Japan advised their citizens to exercise care in France, joining the US, Russia and other countries.

The victim was identified as 61-year-old Jean-Jacques Le Chenadec.

Mr Le Chenadec was trying to put out a fire in a bin at his housing project in the north-eastern suburb of Stains on Friday when an attacker beat him into a coma, police said.

Apparent copycat attacks spread outside France for the first time, with five cars torched outside Brussels' main train station, police in the Belgian capital said.

The mayhem started as an outburst of anger in suburban Paris housing projects and has fanned out nationwide among disaffected youths, many of Muslim or African descent, to become France's worst civil unrest in over a decade. France's Muslim community at some five million people is Western Europe's largest.

Attacks overnight were reported in 274 towns, and police made 395 arrests, Mr Gaudin said.

He also noted the violence appeared to be worsening elsewhere.

It was the first time police had been injured by weapons fire, officials said.

Among the injured police, 10 were hurt by youths firing fine-grain birdshot in a late-night clash in the southern Paris suburb of Grigny, police spokesman Patrick Hamon said.

Two were taken to hospital, but their lives were not in danger.

The unrest began in the low-income Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois after the deaths of two teenagers of Mauritanian and Tunisian descent. The youths were accidentally electrocuted as they hid from police in a power substation, thinking they were being chased.

Since the riots began, 4,700 cars have been burned and 1,200 suspects were detained, Mr Gaudin said.

France's biggest Muslim fundamentalist organisation, the Union for Islamic

Organisations of France, issued a fatwa, or religious decree, to try to halt the violence.

It forbade those "who seek divine grace from taking part in any action that blindly strikes private or public property or can harm others".