Police and fire crews attacked as Paris rioting spreads

The French government faced mounting pressure today as suburban unrest took on dangerous new momentum, with shots fired at police and fire crews as they battled youths who torched car dealerships and public buses and hurled rocks at commuter trains.

Rioters ignored an appeal for calm from French President Jacques Chirac, whose government worked feverishly to fend off a political crisis amid criticism that it has ignored problems in Parisian suburbs heavily populated by first- and second-generation North African and Muslim immigrants.

Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin called a string of emergency meetings with Cabinet ministers throughout the day, as police braced for another night of violence.

The riots, sparked last Thursday by the accidental deaths of two teenagers in the northeastern suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois, spread last night to at least 10 Paris-region towns with acts of violence that ranged from stone-throwing and torching vehicles to attacking police.

Four shots were fired at riot police and firefighters, without causing injuries, said Jean-Francois Cordet, the top government official for the troubled Seine-Saint-Denis region north of Paris where the violence has been concentrated.

Nine people were injured in Seine-Saint-Denis and 315 cars were torched across the Paris area, officials said.

In the tough northeastern suburb of Aulnay-sous-Bois, gangs of youths torched a Renault car dealership and destroyed at least a dozen cars, a supermarket and a local gymnasium.

Traffic was halted this morning on a suburban commuter rail line which links Paris to Charles de Gaulle airport after stone-throwing rioters attacked two trains overnight at the L Blanc-Mesnil station. They forced a conductor from one train and broke windows, the SNCF rail authority said. A female passenger was lightly injured by broken glass.

The unrest has highlighted the division between France’s big cities and their poor suburbs. Frustrations have been simmering in housing projects that dominate the area, which is marked by high unemployment, crime and poverty.

The violence has also cast doubt on the success of France’s model of seeking to integrate its large immigrant community – its Muslim population, at an estimated five million, is Western Europe’s largest – by playing down differences between ethnic groups. But rather than be embraced as full and equal citizens, immigrants and their French-born children often complain of police harassment and of being refused jobs, housing and opportunities.

Opposition groups accused the government of letting the situation spiral out of control, either by failing to act quickly enough or letting in too many immigrants over the years.

“We see that the situation in certain neighbourhoods is not getting better at all, but degenerating,” Socialist Party President Jean-Marc Ayrault told LCI television, who said Chirac’s conservatives “did not know how to take control.”

Right-wing French MP Philippe de Villiers, who has said he wants to “stop the Islamisation of France,” told RTL radio that the problem stemmed from the “failure of a policy of massive and uncontrolled immigration.”

Minister of Social Cohesion Jean-Louis Borloo said the government had to react “firmly” but added that France must also acknowledge its failure to have dealt with anger simmering in poor suburbs for decades.

“We cannot hide the truth: that for 30 years we have not done enough,” he told France-2 television.