2023-07-08 20:08:35
Almost two weeks following the fatal police officer shot a teenager during a traffic check near Paris, hundreds of people demonstrated once morest police violence in several French cities on Saturday. Although the police in Paris had banned a demonstration in memory of the young black man Adama Traoré, who died in 2016 following being pursued by the police, around 1,000 demonstrators gathered on the Place de la République in the followingnoon.
“They want to hide our dead, they want to hide the police violence and the silence of the French state in the face of our dead,” said the dead man’s sister, Assa Traore, at the demonstration, as reported by the newspaper “Le Parisien”. “Today France cannot say that it is in a democratic constitution. That is wrong, we were forbidden to march.” Traoré later called on the participants to end the rally peacefully. As reported by “Le Parisien”, there were arrests and attacks by police officers on journalists who were filming them. Among the demonstrators were also members of the Left Alliance in Parliament.
In Strasbourg, a protest march with several hundred participants started in the morning. The demonstrators carried a banner that read “In grief and in anger”. A demonstration in Marseille with hundreds of participants commemorated a 19-year-old who was shot dead by the police in 2021 when he tried to evade control. There were also rallies in Lille and Saint-Nazaire.
Since the death of 17-year-old Nahel in a traffic stop almost two weeks ago, France has been shaken by serious riots and protests once morest police violence. There were repeated looting, arson attacks and violent confrontations between police officers and rioters. The officer who fired the fatal shot at the youth is being investigated on suspicion of manslaughter. The unrest has since abated. The concern, however, is that they will flare up once more on the national holiday on July 14th.
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