Newsman: The unrest atmosphere lingered in Nanterre France on Saturday following the funeral of a French teenager who was fatally shot by police in the Paris suburb earlier this week.
French President Emmanuel Macron has postponed his planned state visit to Germany, the press office of the German presidency said in a statement Saturday.
Macron spoke with German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier by phone to brief him on the “situation in his country,” the statement said. He had been due to visit Germany from July 2 to July 4.
On Friday, the German government expressed “concern” over the unrest sweeping France.
Protests continued into the early hours of Saturday in defiance of a ban announced a day earlier on all “large-scale events” in the country, with rioting breaking out in several cities, CNN affiliate BFMTV reported.
Authorities are bracing for a fifth night of violence after the 17-year-old’s death sparked a series of protests in the French capital and other cities across the country.
The officer who is accused of shooting him was taken to jail. (ANI)
France’s Interior Ministry said Saturday that 1,311 people had been detained following the fourth night of violence, an update on its previous figure. It said 2,560 fires had been reported on public roads, with 1,350 cars burned, and that there had been 234 incidents of damage or fire in buildings.
Seventy-nine police and gendarmes were injured over the course of Friday night and there were 58 attacks on police and gendarme stations, it added.
Two police officers suffered gunshot wounds in Vaulx-en-Velin, a suburb of Lyon, the Interior Ministry said, one to the nose and the other to the thigh.
The Interior Ministry said it would send its elite unit of riot police, CRS 8, to Lyon on Saturday night as it seeks to clamp down on the violence.
More than 700 businesses across France have been damaged since the start of the protests, French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire told a news conference Saturday.
Family and friends gathered Saturday afternoon local time for the funeral service at a mosque in Nanterre. The funeral was solemn and quiet, with people waiting in silence for his coffin to leave the mosque and be taken for burial.A heavy security presence was in place around the mosque.
The boy’s mother, Mounia, told television station France 5 on Friday that she blamed only the officer who shot her son, Nahel Merzouk, for his death. Nonetheless, the killing has sparked widespread destructive unrest and questions over whether race was a factor in his death.
The French president has faced criticism after he was spotted at an Elton John concert on Wednesday while buildings were being defaced and cars burned across the country.
The continued violence overnight into Saturday came despite French police deploying 45,000 officers, special units, armored vehicles and helicopters across the country.
The country’s interior minister, Gerald Darmanin, said in a tweet that reinforcements would be sent to Marseille on Saturday following reports by the local mayor of violence and looting.
Marseille mayor Benoit Payan had tweeted late Friday night that the scenes were “unacceptable” and called upon the state to “immediately send additional law enforcement forces.”
There was an explosion in the Old Port of Marseille on Friday evening, according to CNN affiliate BFMTV, but no casualties were reported. The broadcaster also shared video showing damage to the Alcazar library in Marseille which it said had been vandalized during the night.
The previous night, 917 people were detained across the country, among them children as young as 13, Darmanin told French TV channel TF1.
Based on numbers released by France’s Interior Ministry, CNN estimates that more than 2,000 protesters have been detained and around 522 police officers and gendarmes injured since the unrest first broke out on Tuesday.
A man was killed by a “stray bullet” during riots in Cayenne, the capital of French Guiana, on Thursday evening, according to a statement from the city’s mayor.
And authorities in Réunion, a French department in the Indian Ocean, said Saturday that at least 28 people had been detained in riots there, while five police officers and a gendarme were injured.
