Valls (second right) with Trappes Mayor Guy Malandain (right), listens to inhabitants
yesterday in Trappes, a suburb of Paris.
Reuters/Paris
A French youth was handed a six-month prison sentence yesterday over the riots that convulsed a poor Paris suburb at the weekend, following a stand-off between police and the wearer of a banned Islamic face veil.
Three men in their 20s were tried over their alleged involvement in the first night of rioting on Friday in the western suburb of Trappes.
Two of the three were cleared of the charges. The third was sentenced to six months imprisonment but was set free after being given leave to seek a reduced sentence.
Around 200 demonstrators attacked Trappes police station on Friday night, in the worst violence in the area since the mass riots that followed the deaths of two black teens during a police operation in the suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois in 2005.
The police fired teargas and used stun grenades to disperse the demonstrators, who pelted the station with stones and set fire to bus shelters and rubbish bins to protest the arrest of a man who resisted his veiled wife undergoing an identity check.
A 14-year-old boy received serious eye injuries. Witnesses told Le Monde newspaper he was hit by a projectile from a police flashball gun.
The head of France’s human rights authority, Dominique Baudis, has launched an investigation into the incident, Le Monde reported.
Smaller riots took place Saturday in Trappes and two neighbouring towns. By yesterday the situation was in hand, according to Interior Minister Manuel Valls.
Both Valls and Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault described the violence as “unacceptable.”
The circumstances of the incident that sparked the riots remain unclear.
Three officers stopped a 20-year-old Muslim convert on Thursday for wearing a full-body veil in defiance of a 2011 law against garments that cover the face.
In cases like this, of which there have been over 600 in two years, the officer usually asks the wearer of the veil to uncover her face for an identity check, and then lets her go with a caution.
But the situation in Trappes degenerated.
The woman told the Collective against Islamophobia in France that the police pushed her mother and then grabbed her by the veil and pinned her against the bonnet of the car.
The police dispute that account and said her husband lunged at a police officer and tried to strangle him. He was released from custody on Saturday and ordered to appear in court in September.
On a visit to the area yesterday Valls again backed the police.
“There is only one law in our country, which is that of the republic. There is no moratorium for any religion,” he said.
At the same time he warned against tarring all residents of poor suburbs or all Muslims for the actions of a small “minority of thugs”.
Many Trappes residents had condemned the riots, which comes in the middle of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan.
A number of right-wing politicians have seized on the unrest to accuse the Socialist government of being soft on crime in suburbs with large immigrant populations, allegations it rejects.
