French motorcyclist whose crash fuelled riots urges calm amid more unrest

A motorcyclist whose crash into a police car has been a catalyst for rioting near Paris appealed for calm as a fourth night of unrest hit the city's working-class suburbs. A stringent lockdown ordered by the government and enforced by police to tackle the coronavirus epidemic has exacerbated deep-seated social tensions in the deprived, high-rise neighbourhoods that ring the capital.

Violence flared on Saturday after the rider, who was on an unlicensed motorbike, crashed into the open door of a police car and required surgery to his leg. "Go home and calm down. Justice will be served," he said from his hospital bed in a video broadcast on Wednesday by French media including BFM TV.

Some local residents said officers deliberately opened the door into his path, and police have said an investigation is under way. On Tuesday night, crowds of youths in Villeneuve-La-Garenne north of the capital torched cars and rained fireworks down on riot police, social media footage showed. Officers swarmed into one housing estate as garbage from upturned bins burned around them, according to a Reuters witness.

"They're just people who want to defend themselves," one veiled woman shouted down to police from a balcony. "...No one is listening to us." In Nanterre, further to the west, the streets were littered with the charred remains of cars that had been set on fire. Unrest also broke out in the Clichy district just north of the Paris city boundary.

'CANNON FODDER' The outbreak has hit the Paris suburbs hard, with the combination of cramped social housing, workers with frontline jobs and a restless young generation turning some into infection hotspots.

France had documented nearly 21,000 coronavirus deaths and around 117,000 confirmed cases as of Tuesday evening. The head of France's largest police union, the SGP Unite, told Reuters on Tuesday the high-rise suburbs could "explode", drawing parallels between this week's unrest and the lead-up to riots fifteen years ago that lasted three weeks.

A second police union, Alliance, accused the government of trying to "buy a certain social peace" by failing to act against the minority who were stirring unrest and attacking officers. "The police will not be the state's cannon fodder," it wrote in a letter made public late on Tuesday.

The interior ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment. It has previously said some of the those behind the unrest were connected to drug gangs, whose activities the lockdown had curtailed.

(This story has not been edited by Devdiscourse staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)