Riots Worsen in French Cities - 10 policement hurt

By Aussiegirl

The violence continues and spreads throughout France.

10 Officers Shot as Riots Worsen in French Cities - New York Times

PARIS, Monday, Nov. 7 - Rioters fired shotguns at the police in a working-class suburb of Paris on Sunday, wounding 10 officers as the country's fast-spreading urban unrest escalated dangerously. Just hours earlier, President Jacques Chirac called an emergency meeting of top security officials and promised increased police pressure to confront the violence.

"The republic is completely determined to be stronger than those who want to sow violence or fear," Mr. Chirac said at a news conference in the courtyard of Élysée Palace after meeting with his internal security council. "The last word must be from the law."

But the violence, which has become one of the most serious challenges to governmental authority here in nearly 40 years, showed no sign of abating, and Sunday was the first day that police officers had been wounded by gunfire in the unrest. More than 3,300 vehicles have been destroyed, along with dozens of public buildings and private businesses, since the violence began.

"This is just the beginning," said Moussa Diallo, 22, a tall, unemployed French-African man in Clichy-sous-Bois, the working-class Parisian suburb where the violence started Oct. 27. "It's not going to end until there are two policemen dead."

On Saturday night alone, the tally in the rioting reached a peak of 1,300 vehicles burned, stretching into the heart of Paris, where 35 vehicles were destroyed, and touching a dozen other cities across the country.

Fires were burning in several places on Sunday night and hundreds of youths were reported to have clashed with the police in Grigny, a southern suburb of Paris where the shooting took place. On Saturday night, a car was rammed into the front of a McDonald's restaurant in the town.

"We have 10 policemen that were hit by gunfire in Grigny, and two of them are in the hospital," Patrick Hamon, a national police spokesman, said Monday morning.

He said one of the officers hospitalized had been hit in the neck, the other in the leg, but added that neither wound was considered life-threatening.

Rampaging youths have attacked the police and property in cities as far away as Toulouse and Marseille and in the resort towns of Cannes and Nice in the south, Lille in the north and Strasbourg to the east.

In Évreux, 60 miles west of Paris, shops, businesses, a post office and two schools were destroyed, along with at least 50 vehicles, in Saturday night's most concentrated attacks. Five police officers and three firefighters were injured in clashes with young rioters, a national police spokesman said.

Despite help from thousands of reinforcements, the police appeared powerless to stop the mayhem. As they apply pressure in one area, the attacks slip away to another.

Most people said they sensed that the escalation of the past few days had changed the rules of the game: besides the number of attacks, the level of destruction has grown sharply, with substantial businesses and public buildings going down in flames. Besides the gunfire on Sunday, residents of some high-rise apartment blocks have been throwing steel boccie balls and improvised explosives at national riot police officers patrolling below.