Gangs run riot in sixth night of violence in France

Unrest spread across troubled suburbs around Paris in a sixth night of violence as police clashed with angry youths and scores of vehicles were set on fire in at least nine towns.

Police in riot gear fired rubber bullets last night at advancing gangs of youths in Aulnay-sous-Bois – one of the worst-hit suburbs – where 15 cars were burned. Youths lobbed Molotov cocktails at an annex to the town hall and threw stones at the fire station. It was not immediately clear whether the clashes led to any injuries.

Four people were arrested for throwing stones at police in nearby Bondy where 14 cars were burned. A fire engulfed a carpet store, but it was not immediately clear whether the blaze was linked to the suburban unrest.

Officials gave an initial count of 69 vehicles torched in nine suburbs across the Seine-Saint-Denis region that arcs around Paris on the north and north east. The area, home mainly to families of immigrant origin, most of them from Muslim North Africa, is marked by soaring unemployment and delinquency.

Anger and despair thrive in the tall cinder-block towers and long, blocky buildings that typically make up housing projects in France.

No trouble was immediately reported in Clichy-sous-Bois, where rioting began on Thursday after the accidental deaths of two teenagers electrocuted in a power sub-station where they hid to escape police. A third was injured. Officials have said police were not pursuing the boys, aged 15 and 17.

A tear gas grenade that landed in the Clichy-sous-Bois mosque on Sunday night fuelled anger, along with arrests. It was unclear who fired the tear gas.

Interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy – blamed by many for fanning the violence with tough talk and harsh tactics – met youths and officials from Clichy-sous-Bois last night in a bid to cap days of rioting.

But the unrest spread even as they met.

An Associated Press Television news team witnessed confrontations between about 20 police and 40 youths in Aulnay-sous-Bois with police firing tear gas and rubber bullets.

Officials said that “small, very mobile gangs” were harassing police and setting fires to garbage cans and vehicles throughout the region.

France-Info radio said some 150 blazes were reported in rubbish bins, cars and buildings across Seine-Saint-Denis, an area of soaring unemployment, delinquency and other urban ills. The unrest highlighted the division between France’s big cities and their poor suburbs, where anger and despair thrive.

Tension had mounted throughout yesterday after young men torched cars, bins and even a primary school 24 hours earlier. Scores of cars were reported burned on Monday night in Clichy-sous-Bois and 13 people were jailed.

Youths set two rooms of a primary school in Sevran on fire on Monday, along with several cars, mayor Stephane Gatignon said.

Sarkozy, a law-and-order interior minister, said social aid to the suburbs provided over the years had been a failed tactic.

“We often accepted the unacceptable,” he said in an interview in Wednesday’s Le Parisien newspaper. “The reigning order is too often the order of gangs, drugs, traffickers. The neighbourhoods are waiting for firmness but also justice” and jobs.

Prime minister Dominique de Villepin met the parents of the three families yesterday, promising a full investigation of the deaths and insisting on “the need to restore calm”, the prime minister’s office said.

In a bid to open a dialogue, Sarkozy met victims’ relatives, other youths, a police representative and officials from Clichy-sous-Bois. No information on the talks was made available.

Sarkozy came under a growing torrent of criticism for allegedly inflaming the crisis. He recently referred to the troublemakers as “scum” or “riffraff” and in the past vowed to “clean out” the suburbs.

Even within the conservative government, there were critics.

Equal Opportunities Minister Azouz Begag, in an interview in the daily Liberation yesterday, said he “contests this method of becoming submerged by imprecise, warlike semantics”.

Violence first visited French suburbs in 1981, in the Lyon area. For three decades, successive governments have vainly injected funds and projects but failed to cure suburban ills.