Riots sparked by the death of a teenager in Paris who was shot dead by police during a traffic stop has spread to cities in Switzerland and Belgium – but the streets of France were eerily quiet on Sunday evening.
According to the Daily Mail, The alleged ‘execution’ of Nahel Merzouk, 17, who was of Algerian and Moroccan descent, has fuelled days of arrest and forced President Emmanuel Macron to hold crisis talks on Sunday night.
Some regions have banned the sale of fireworks and restricted street access in a bid to curb the ongoing unrest – and there are 45,000 extra police have been placed on the streets in French cities and towns.
However, the streets of in the Paris suburb of Nanterre – where Nahel was shot dead – were ‘very calm’ as he compared it to an ordinary Sunday, a police source told Le Parisien.
Meanwhile, a police source said it was a ‘fairly classic’ Sunday evening in the Seine-Saint-Denis. Marseille, which saw police fire teargas rioters on Saturday night as youths lit fires and looted in the city center, was also relatively calm. By 11.30 pm on Sunday, police had arrested 49 people, according to the Ministry of Interior.
It comes after days of unrest in France, which has spread to Brussels in Belgium and Lausanne in Switzerland. In the early hours of Sunday morning, protesters in Lausanne threw Molotov cocktails and bricks at police and smashed shop windows.
‘Echoing the events and riots raging in France, more than a hundred youths gathered in central Lausanne and damaged businesses,’ said a Lausanne police statement.
There have also been arrests in Brussels following similar disturbances, with rioters in Brussel chanting ‘Justice for Nahel’.
After the riots in Lausanne, seven people – aged between 15 and 17 and one aged 24 – were arrested, according to Swiss newspaper reports.
Today, Nahel’s grandmother called for calm and said she wanted the nationwide rioting triggered by his killing to end.
She said the rioters were using Nahel’s death last Tuesday as an excuse to cause havoc, and the unrest was not in her grandson’s name.
‘I’m telling them [the rioters] to stop,’ the grandmother, identified as Nadia by French media, told BFM TV. ‘Don’t break windows, buses… schools. We want to calm things down.
She added: ‘Nahel is dead. My daughter is lost… she doesn’t have a life anymore.’ Asked about a crowdfunding campaign that had received pledges of more than £575,000 (670,000€) for the police officer charged with voluntary homicide over the shooting, Nadia said: ‘My heart aches.’
