Global Courant
The teenager, of Algerian descent, was killed by a single gunshot Tuesday morning during a traffic check in the working-class Paris of Nanterre.
The police officer who fired said he feared someone, including him or his colleague, would be hit by the car after Nahel ran a red light, Nanterre prosecutor Pascal Prache said in a statement Thursday. Prache said the officer charged with the murder had been given a preliminary charge of voluntary manslaughter and was being held in custody.
The legal team representing the teen’s family has not said whether it believes race was a factor in the shooting, which has sparked long-standing tensions between French police and youths living in deprived neighborhoods in the capital’s suburbs and elsewhere .
Nahel’s mother, identified as Mounia M., told France 5 earlier this week that she was more angry with the accused officer than with the police in general. “He saw a little Arab-looking boy, he wanted to kill himself,” she said. “A police officer cannot take his gun and shoot our children, take our children’s lives.”
Nahel’s funeral ceremony began on Saturday. It was a private matter; family and friends viewed the open casket before it was taken to a mosque for a ceremony and later buried in a city cemetery.
Mounia M. stands on top of a truck on Thursday during a memorial march for her son in Nanterre, Paris.Alain Jocard/AFP via Getty Images
Despite a call to parents by President Emmanuel Macron to keep their children at home, street battles raged between young protesters and police on Friday.
Nearly 90 arrests were made in Marseille on Friday, according to the Interior Ministry, after Marseille Mayor Benoît Payan called on the government to “immediately send additional law enforcement officers”. Footage from protests in the southern port city shows people setting fire to barricades, throwing objects at police cars and running from tear gas.
Guns were looted from a gun store and a man was later arrested with a shotgun, police said.
In Vaulx-en-Velin, a suburb of the eastern city of Lyon, three police officers were shot with a shotgun as authorities reported street fires and looting in the city, and an unauthorized protest drew more than 1,000 people, the Interior Ministry said. Affairs. .
There was also unrest in the South American overseas department of French Guiana, where a 54-year-old died after being hit by a stray bullet, authorities told the Associated Press.
Marine Le Pen, a figurehead of France’s far-right and parliamentary leader of the anti-immigration party the National Rally, stepped up pressure on the French government by calling for a “state of emergency” on Friday.
“For several days now, a state of endemic disorder has reigned in the country, the images and echoes of which are chillingly brutal,” she said on Twitter on Friday. “I ask the President of the Republic to receive without further delay the parties represented in the National Assembly.”
In France, a state of emergency gives more powers to the police and military, such as the right to impose curfews at any time, restrict freedom of movement, prevent mass gatherings and conduct searches without judicial oversight.
