Rioters battle police in Paris suburb

Police combed the rooftops in a Paris suburb on May 31 in search of objects that could be hurled at them while others patrolled the streets after two nights of violence. Angry youths had torched cars and hurled stones at police in Montfermeil, a suburb 10 miles east of Paris that borders Clichy-Sous-Bois–the flash point of riots last autumn that spread across the mostly immigrant suburbs of France. On the night of May 29, bands of young people hurled Molotov cocktails at public buildings and took to the streets with baseball bats. Police fired rubber bullets to disperse roughly 100 youths, while nine police were slightly hurt. The trigger of this week's unrest was the arrest that day of a suspect in the beating of a bus driver earlier last month, the Montfermeil mayor's office said. The following night, youths torched a dozen cars and threw a firebomb into a police vehicle, setting it ablaze just as the officers jumped out. About 15 young people hurled projectiles at police in nearby Clichy-sous-Bois. Six police officers suffered light injuries and 13 people were detained, police said. Tension in Montfermeil has remained high since the mayor last month banned teenagers from circulating in groups of more than three, and ordered youths under 16 to be accompanied by an adult in public after 8pm. A court later overturned the bans after protests from civil liberties groups. On May 29, at least 150 youths, many hooded and with baseball bats, fought riot police for more than four hours, gas-bombing buildings and smashing the windows of the town hall before gathering outside of Mayor Xavier Lemoine's house, which they pelted with bricks. "Around 100 hooded youths stoned my home shouting 'the mayor is a son of a bitch,'" said Lemoine, a former naval officer with seven children. Last fall the French government promised to improve living conditions and job opportunities in suburbs heavily populated by immigrant families and where unemployment is rampant, but little has been done and the government's main initiative–a youth jobs bill–ended with this spring's student demonstrations. At the same time, police have said crime has increased in poor suburban neighborhoods, and frustration with the government has continued to fester. Three weeks of riots last fall raised the curtain on the poverty and ethnic discrimination faced by those living in France's ghetto-like suburban estates, and the frustration boiling under the surface. Rioting spread last October from a run-down estate in Clichy-sous-Bois to low-income areas across the country, following the electrocution of two local teenagers who believed they were being chased by police. Some 10,000 cars and 200 public buildings were torched in the three-week frenzy, which at its height reached 300 towns, leading to more than 5,000 arrests and 400 jail convictions.