JEDDAH: Saudi citizens in France were urged on Friday to be alert and take special care after three nights of rioting in Paris and major cities throughout the country.
The Saudi Embassy in Paris said Saudis should be aware of the protests and the curfew in place in several areas.
They were advised to “observe caution, and to stay away from sites of protests, and to follow the instructions of the French authorities.”
France asked all local authorities to halt public transport on Friday in a desperate attempt to restore order after rioters torched buildings and cars in riots sparked by the police shooting of a teenager.
Violence flared in the cities of Marseille, Lyon, Pau, Toulouse, Strasbourg and Lille as well as Paris, where 17-year-old Nahel M. — of Algerian and Moroccan descent — was shot dead on Tuesday in the working-class suburb of Nanterre.
His death, caught on video at a traffic stop, has ignited longstanding complaints about police violence and racism directed at poor, racially mixed, urban communities.
“The next hours will be decisive and I know I can count on your flawless efforts,” Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin told police officers and firefighters seeking to quell the unrest.
With about 40,000 police officers deployed, more than 200 of them were injured and 875 people were arrested overnight into Friday. Buildings and vehicles were torched, and stores looted. Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne described the violence as “intolerable.”
Videos on social media showed urban landscapes ablaze. A tram was set alight in the eastern city of Lyon and 12 buses gutted in a depot in Aubervilliers,
northern Paris.
In Nanterre on the capital’s outskirts, protesters torched cars, barricaded streets and hurled projectiles at police following an earlier peaceful vigil.
Looters ransacked shops including an Apple store in the eastern city of Strasbourg. Several supermarkets were looted.
In the Chatelet Les Halles shopping mall in central Paris, a Nike shoe store was broken into, and several people were arrested after store windows were smashed along the adjacent Rue de Rivoli shopping street.
President Emmanuel Macron left an EU summit in Brussels early to attend the second Cabinet crisis meeting in two days.
He asked social media to remove “the most sensitive” footage of rioting and to disclose identities
of users fomenting violence.
Mohamed Jakoubi, who watched Nahel grow up as a child, said the rage was fueled by a sense of injustice in the suburbs after police violence against minority ethnic communities, many from former French colonies.
“We are fed up, we are French too. We are against violence, we are not scum,” he said.
