Posted on 10/28/2006 6:41:35 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
CLICHY-SOUS-BOIS, France - Marauding youths torched hundreds of vehicles overnight and on Saturday in renewed violence coinciding with the first anniversary of riots that exposed a deep schism between poor North African immigrants and mainstream France.
A group of teenagers set one bus on fire Saturday in the southern French port city of Marseille, seriously wounding a passenger. Three others suffered from smoke inhalation, police said. Two other public buses and 277 vehicles around the country were burned overnight, police said.
Six police were injured and 47 people were arrested, ministry officials said. Still the Interior Ministry described the night as "relative calm," noting that up to 100 cars are torched by youths in troubled neighborhoods on an average night.
Police had braced for a bigger replay of violence in the poor suburbs predominantly made up of Muslims from former French colonies in Africa. Friday marked the one-year anniversary of the deaths of two teens that ignited three weeks of riots in 2005.
The rioting was fueled by anger at France's failure to offer equal opportunities to many minorities — especially Arabs and blacks — and France's 5 million-strong Muslim population.
France's trouble integrating minorities and the suburban unrest are becoming hot political issues in the campaign for next year's presidential and parliamentary elections. The government passed an equal opportunities law this spring and has poured funds into "sensitive" areas, but disenchantment is still pervasive.
The latest unrest centered on the troubled suburbs that ring Paris. Half the cars burned nationwide overnight were torched in the region around the capital. Of the 47 arrests, 33 people were taken into custody in the Paris suburbs, mostly for throwing projectiles, burning cars or generally vandalizing property, police said.
The national police said about 4,000 extra police and riot officers were deployed across the country to cope with a possible resurgence of violence. Some 7,000 police are at the ready on an average night in France, officials have said.
The bus attacks late Friday were not far from the site where the two teens were electrocuted in a power substation in Paris suburb Clichy-sous-Bois on Oct. 27, 2005. The two were hiding after what they thought was a police chase.
One bus was engulfed in flames at the foot of a high-rise housing project.
"Four guys attacked Bus 346," said witness Thierry Ange, 19. "They made everyone get off, then they hit a woman and dragged out the bus driver by his tie," then torched the bus with a gasoline bomb in a bottle, he said.
The blackened remains of another bus burned earlier stood across town. Two armed men had forced passengers off the bus, police said.
Youths also tried to burn a bus in Reims in eastern France, and attackers hurled metal balls at an empty bus in Trappes, west of Paris, the Interior Ministry said.
Scores of police, wielding shields and backed by a helicopter shining its searchlight, swept into a tough housing project in Montfermeil, a town near Clichy-sous-Bois, and several youths responded by throwing stones.
Paris' transport authority responded to the violence by curtailing bus services in the Seine-Saint-Denis region north of the capital, which is home to thousands of immigrants and their French-born children.
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Associated Press writers Jean-Marie Godard and Jean-Pierre Verges contributed to this report from Paris.
Kill a few of them and they'll stop.
We'll know France is a civilized country when they start shooting to kill.
I fear that this kind of stuff is going to happen in our country. Not for the same reason but for the kids in college that feel that we should not be in Iraq or at war or whatever. The Democrats are trying so hard to gather the youth and all to believe the war we are now is equal to the Vietnam war. So very sad.
Support our troops!
If that happened here John Q. Public will be taking pot shots with his rifle from his bedroom window.
Oh, so that's the problem.....
Yep, just start shoot with real bullets, and all this BS will stop.
They're not going to shoot. Once again, they are going to wait for somebody else to come over to shoot.
The French started this problem decades ago. And now they don't seem to have a solution for it. Some suburbs where North African and Arabs live are basically no go zones for the French police. It is called the "occupied territory" on French soil! Hmm, interesting, isn't it?
If they don’t like the political and job climate in France … send them back to their country of origin and see if it benefits them better.
Y-A-W-N Wake me when it's over. France, that is.
This would be easy to stop: Invite some rednecks over with sniper rifles and a case of Budweiser, put a new Renault in plain view and let them come on. No limit, bag as many as you like.
You would have to change the law about shooting over bait though.
Socialism is working real well in France.
They can't be sent back to anywhere. Firstly, they are from ex French colonies and secondly, they are mostly born and raised in France. That makes them technically rather French.
Cheese eating surrender monkeys, huh?
<< Ya got the running of the bulls in Pamplona, the sparrows returning to San Juan Capistrano, spring break at Daytona,, and now ... the burning of cars (and buses) in the streets of FRance. >>
Or, rather, Ya got the original psychopathic pedophile and false fuhrer's followers' mass-murdering, for a millennium or so, of millions, mass rapes and sexual mutilations, pandemic shirt lifting, pillow biting, mattress munching, turd burgling and goat, sister, cousin, wife and little boy buggering, Tehran, Dar es Salaam, Nairobi, Bali, USS Cole, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Israel, Mogadishu, World Trade Center, (twice) Madrid, London and Bombay -- and now ... the burning of cars (and buses) in the streets of FRance.
Islam is a manifestation of evil. A malignancy absolutely incompatible with Judeo-Christian/Western/Human Civilization.
And we will radically surgically excise this cancer from our Civilization or will all die from it!
The rioting was fueled by anger at (name any country) failure to offer equal opportunities to many minorities — especially Arabs and blacks — and (name any country) Muslim population.
Let's see, I've heard this same excuse..er,argument... in 1964, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980, 1981, 1982, 1983.....oh schucks, my fingers are getting tired.
I invite France to JOIN THE FIGHT instead of work against the US. Its best for them to start at home.
They surrendered a long time ago when they declared the slums no-go zones.
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