‘I blame one person,’ mother of teen killed by police says as hundreds arrested in fresh violence across France

CNN

By Joshua Berlinger, CNN

Paris (CNN) — The mother of a 17-year-old killed by French police said she blames only the officer who shot her son for his death, a tragedy that has sparked three consecutive nights of destructive unrest and revived a heated debate about discrimination and policing in low-income, multi-ethnic communities.

The boy, Nahel, was shot dead during a traffic stop Tuesday morning in the Paris suburb of Nanterre. Footage of the incident filmed by a bystander showed two officers standing on the driver’s side of the car, one of whom fired his gun at the driver despite not appearing to be in any immediate danger.

The officer said he fired his gun out of fear that the boy would run someone over with the car, according to Nanterre prosecutor Pascal Prache.

“I don’t blame the police, I blame one person, the one who took my son’s life,” Nahel’s mother, Mounia, told television station France 5 in an on-camera interview.

Prache said that it is believed the officer acted illegally in using his weapon. He is currently facing a formal investigation for voluntary homicide and has been placed in preliminary detention, CNN affiliate BFMTV reported Thursday.

Despite calls from top officials for patience to allow time for the justice system to run its course, a sizable number of people across France remain shocked and angry, especially young men and women of color who have been victims of discrimination by police.

That anger has, for three nights in a row, given way to violent protests across the nation.

Ahead of an expected night of unrest, France deployed nearly 40,000 officers Thursday and sent its elite police force, the RAID, to the cities of Bordeaux, Lyon, Roubaix, Marseille and Lille to help contain the protests, which saw 667 people arrested across the country, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said Friday morning. The Interior Ministry said 249 police officers and gendarmes were injured.

Confrontations flared between protesters and police in Nanterre, where a bank was set on fire and graffiti saying “vengeance pour Nael” (using an alternative spelling of his name) was spray painted on a wall nearby, according to footage from the suburb.

A mall in central Paris was also damaged, while several other suburbs were rocked by violence, including Montreuil and Aubervilliers, where 12 city buses were charred in a parking lot.

Protesters threw fireworks at police officers in Marseille, according to CNN affiliate BFMTV, while footage from the northern city of Lille showed fires burning on streets and riot police officers running. Six people were taken in for questioning after participating in a protest banned by authorities in Lille, the regional authority said in a Facebook post.

The violence has prompted President Emmanuel Macron to hold a crisis meeting the second day in a row, BFMTV reported, as his government tries to avoid a repeat of 2005. The deaths of two teenage boys hiding from police that year sparked three weeks of rioting and prompted the government to call a state of emergency.

Continued unrest would be a major blow to the government’s agenda. Macron and his ministers have spent much of the year dealing with the fallout of pushing through extremely unpopular pension reforms that were divisive enough that the government felt it necessary to launch a 100-day plan to heal and unite the country.

That deadline is up on July 14, France’s national day.

If Macron’s government is to address allegations of institutional racism in response to Nahel’s death, it will be a tough balancing act.

Race and discrimination are always tricky political issues, but in France they are particularly challenging due to the country’s unique brand of secularism, which seeks to ensure equality for all by removing markers of difference, rendering all citizens French first.

In practice, however, that vigorous adherence to French Republicanism often prevents the government from doing anything that would appear to differentiate French citizens on the basis of race, including collecting statistics.

Mounia, like other activists, believes her son’s race was a factor in his killing. French media have reported that Nahel was of Algerian descent, and the country’s Foreign Ministry on Thursday issued a statement extending its condolences to Nahel’s family.

“He saw an Arab face, a little kid, and wanted to take his life,” she said, referring to the police officer who fired their weapon.

“Killing youngsters like this, how long is this going to last?” she added. “How many mothers are going to be like me? What are they waiting for?”

While the government’s approach has so far been cautious, left-wing politicians and some activists have called for police reform, including abolishing a 2017 law that allowed police greater leeway in when they can use firearms.

Laurent-Franck Lienard, the lawyer of the officer accused of shooting Nahel, told French radio station RTL that his client acted in “compliance of the law.” He claimed his client’s prosecution was “political” and being used as a way to calm the violent tensions.

He added that his client was “devastated” by Nahel’s death and he did not want to kill him.

“He committed an act in a second, in a fraction of a second. Perhaps he made a mistake, justice will tell,” Lienard said.

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CNN’s Xiaofei Xu, Niamh Kennedy, Teele Rebane, Isaac Yee and Helen Regan contributed reporting.