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Rioters clashed with police Saturday night on the fifth day of unrest following the fatal police shooting of a 17-year-old boy in a Paris suburb, while a local mayor said he was the victim of an assassination attempt by protesters.
Police had arrested 719 people nationwide by the early hours of Sunday, after a deployment of 45,000 officers and “gendarmes” — the French equivalent of the national guard — in an attempt to control crowds in the quickly unfolding crisis, the French Interior Ministry said.
Some 45 police officers and gendarmes were injured overnight, but “their resolute action, coordinated by the prefects, ensured a calmer night,” the ministry said.
More than 1,300 people were arrested on Friday, suggesting the protests are dying down.
But the mayor of the Paris suburb of l’Hay-les-Roses said that a burning car hit his home injuring his wife and one of their children in an attack he described as an “assassination attempt.”
“At 1:30 a.m., while I was at the town hall as I had been for the past 3 nights, individuals rammed a car into my home before setting it on fire to burn down my house, where my wife and two young children were sleeping,” Mayor Vincent Jeanbrun wrote in a tweet early Sunday.
“My wife and one of my children were injured when they tried to protect themselves and escape the assailants. It was an unspeakable, cowardly assassination attempt,” he said.
Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin echoed the description of the event as an attempted assassination on Sunday morning, and said on Twitter that “major judicial police resources” had been mobilized for an investigation.
On Monday, mayors and citizens throughout France will stand in squares outside their local town halls, which will sound sirens, in solidarity with Jeanbrun, David Lisnard, president of the association of mayors of France announced on French television channel TF1 Sunday.
