AP Worldstream
11-05-2005
Dateline: ACHERES, France
Youths armed with gasoline bombs torched scores of vehicles, nursery schools and other targets Saturday from the Paris region to resort cities on the Mediterranean in the 10th consecutive night of violence to rock France, police said.
Five classrooms of the Sleeping Beauty Nursery School in Grigny, in the Essonne region south of Paris, went up in flames as well as two classrooms of another school, police said. It was at least the third nursery school set ablaze in several days.
The previous night, 900 vehicles were torched in the worst wave of arson since the urban violence began Oct. 27.
By 10 p.m. (2100 GMT) Saturday, about 100 vehicles were torched, police said. France-Info radio reported residents catching two 14-year-olds trying to light a fire in Drancy, northeast of Paris, and turning them over to police.
Some 2,300 police were being brought into the Paris region to bolster security, France-Info said.
Police have been forced to adapt to the ever-changing situation, deploying a helicopter for a second night in a row in the suburbs northeast of Paris, where the violence has been concentrated, and small teams of officers to chase down youths speeding from one attack to another in cars and on motorbikes.
The new tactics yielded more than 250 arrests late Friday and early Saturday.
Arson attacks were reported in the Paris region and cities to the north, south, east and west, many known for their calm, like the cultural bastion of Avignon in southern France and the resort cities of Nice and Cannes, where cars were torched, a police officer said.
The officer, with the Interior Ministry's operational center tracking the violence, was not authorized to speak publicly and asked not to be named.
Arson also was reported in Nantes, in the southwest, the Lille region in the north and Saint-Dizier, in the Ardennes region east of Paris. In the eastern city of Strasbourg, 18 cars were set alight in full daylight, police there said.
In the Essonne region outside Paris, a recycling factory also was set afire and at least 35 vehicles torched, a police officer said.
Numerous vehicles were torched in the Seine-Saint-Denis region, northeast of Paris, where the riots erupted after two teenage boys were accidentally electrocuted as they hid from police, apparently thinking they were being pursued. French authorities have denied that police were to blame.
The violence, however, is forcing France to confront anger long-simmering in its suburbs, where many Africans and their French-born children live on society's margins, struggling with unemployment, poor housing, racial discrimination, crime and lack of opportunities.
From an outburst of fury over the deaths of the two teenagers, the unrest is taking on unprecedented scope and intensity.
In quiet Acheres, on the edge of the St. Germain forest west of the capital, arsonists torched a nursery school late Friday, where part of the roof caved in, and about a dozen cars in four attacks over an hour.
Mayor Alain Outreman tried to cool tempers as some residents demanded the army be deployed, or suggested that citizens band together to protect neighborhoods.
"We are not going to start militias," he said. "You would have to be everywhere."
In one particularly malevolent attack, youths in the eastern Paris suburb of Meaux prevented paramedics from evacuating a sick person from a housing project by pelting them and torching a waiting ambulance.
Anger has spread to the Internet, with blogs mourning the youths. Alongside messages of condolence and appeals for calm are insults targeting police, threats of more violence and warnings that the unrest will feed support for France's anti-immigration extreme right.
France's interior minister has warned of possible heavy sentences for torching cars.
Most rioting has been in towns with low-income housing projects where unemployment and distrust of police run high. But in a new development, arsonists were moving beyond their heavily policed neighborhoods to attack others with less security, national police spokesman Patrick Hamon said.
There appeared to be no coordination between separate groups in different areas, Hamon said. But within gangs, he added, youths are communicating by cell phones or e-mails.
On Saturday morning, more than 1,000 people took part in a silent march in one of the worst-hit suburbs, Aulnay-sous-Bois, filing past housing projects and the wrecks of burned cars. One white banner read "No to violence."
Anger was fanned days ago when a tear gas bomb exploded in a mosque in Clichy-sous-Bois, north of Paris _ the same suburb where the youths were electrocuted.
Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy also has inflamed passions by referring to troublemakers as "scum."
The director of the Great Mosque of Paris, Dalil Boubakeur, who met Saturday with Villepin, urged the government to choose its words carefully and send a message of peace.
"In such difficult circumstances, every word counts," Boubakeur said.
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Associated Press writers Jamey Keaten, Angela Doland in Paris, Thierry Boinet in Grenoble contributed to this report.
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