Tensions erupt at Paris protest as police car attacked



AFP
Sat, 23 September 2023 at 11:09 am GMT-6

The French government on Saturday denounced "unacceptable violence" at a protest led by the hard left against police brutality, with officers trapped in their police vehicle after it was attacked, an AFP correspondent said.

The nationwide protest came just under three months after the point-blank killing by a policeman of a youth outside Paris at a traffic check sparked over a week of rioting in Paris and elsewhere.

Hundreds of people wearing black and in hoods broke away from the main march of several thousand people in Paris

They smashed the windows of a bank branch and threw objects at a police car stuck in traffic, an AFP reporter said.

Paris police said that the police car was attacked with a crowbar and only the intervention of an anti-riot police unit allowed the release of the vehicle.

A video later published by the BFMTV channel and shared on the internet showed a group of masked protesters running after the car, repeatedly kicking it, as one man smashes a window with a crowbar.

An officer gets out and brandishes his service weapon, but does not fire it and gets back in the vehicle.

"We see where anti-police hatred leads," Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin wrote on X, formerly Twitter, denouncing "unacceptable violence" against the police.

Paris police chief Laurent Nunez said three people had been arrested over the incident.

Unions said some 80,000 people were expected to protest across France, responding to a call by the radical left including the hard-left France Unbowed (LFI) party but police put the number at 13,800.

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