Paris (EFE).- At least 667 people have been arrested last night in France, the third consecutive riot after the death of a young man in Nanterre by a shot by the police when he tried to flee from a checkpoint.
The figure has been released by the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, in a message on his Twitter account and related it to the “firm” instructions given by his department.
According to Darmanin, who had deployed 40,000 agents to try to prevent the riots from recurring, police, gendarmes and firefighters had to “face unusual violence.”
Protests come to Paris
Once again, the epicenter of the protests has been the city of Nanterre, on the immediate periphery of Paris, where a bank agency was burned down and several public buildings such as schools and a tax center suffered serious damage.
But the wave of violence was not limited to sensitive neighborhoods in the Paris region, but also reached the capital, where there was looting of shops in the Les Halles neighborhood, in the center, and many other cities.
French President Emmanuel Macron has convened a crisis cell that will meet at 1:00 p.m. local time (11:00 GMT) on his return from Brussels, where he is participating in the European Council.
Yesterday he already presided over one early in the morning at the Ministry of the Interior with several members of his Government, to analyze the situation caused by some disturbances that he described as “unjustifiable”.