French riots claim first murder victim: a 61-year-old man beaten by a hooded youth

Craig S. Smith:

France's urban unrest claimed its first victim today when a 61-year-old man beaten by a hooded youth in the Parisian suburb of Stains last week died of his injuries.

The man, Jean-Jacques Le Chenadec, had been in a coma since being attacked while talking with a neighbor about their cars near a working-class housing development.

Word of his death came after escalating violence Sunday, when rioters fired shotguns at the police in a working-class suburb of Paris, wounding 10 officers. The police arrested 395 people across the country overnight, Michel Gaudin, chief of the French national police, told a news conference in Paris today.

On Sunday night alone, authorities said, more than 1,400 vehicles were burned in 274 towns across the country; the destruction stretched into the heart of Paris, where 35 vehicles were destroyed, and touched almost every major city in France The situation was so urgent that President Jacques Chirac called an emergency meeting of top security officials Sunday evening and promised increased police pressure to confront the violence.

An apparent copycat attack took place outside France for the first time, with Belgian police reporting today that five cars had been burned outside the main train station in Brussels.

Several countries, including Australia, Austria, Britain and Germany, advised their citizens to exercise care in France, joining the United States and Russia in warning tourists to stay away from violence-hit areas, news agencies reported.

The violence, which has become one of the most serious challenges to governmental authority here in nearly 40 years, showed no sign of abating. Sunday, the 11th night of violence, was the first that police officers had been wounded by gunfire in the unrest. Two of the officers were hospitalized, but their lives were not in danger, the police said. While there had been earlier reports of rioters firing weapons, the shootings Sunday marked the first time that police officers had been wounded by weapons since the riots began.

There have been 77 members of the police and 31 firemen injured since the unrest started.

Nearly 5,000 vehicles have been destroyed, along with dozens of public buildings and private businesses, since the violence began.

"This is just the beginning," said Moussa Diallo, 22, a tall, unemployed French-African man in Clichy-sous-Bois, the working-class Parisian suburb where the violence started Oct. 27. "It's not going to end until there are two policemen dead."

He was referring to the two teenage boys, one of Mauritanian origin and the other of Tunisian origin, whose accidental deaths while hiding from the police touched off the unrest, reflecting longstanding anger among many immigrant families here over joblessness and discrimination. Mr. Diallo did not say whether he had taken part in the vandalism.

Fires were burning in several places on Sunday night and hundreds of youths were reported to have clashed with the police in Grigny, a southern suburb of Paris where the shooting took place. On Saturday night, a car was rammed into the front of a McDonald's restaurant in the town.

"We have 10 policemen that were hit by gunfire in Grigny, and two of them are in the hospital," Patrick Hamon, a national police spokesman, said Monday morning.

He said one of the officers hospitalized had been hit in the neck, the other in the leg, but added that neither wound was considered life-threatening.

Rampaging youths have attacked the police and property in cities as far away as Toulouse and Marseille and in the resort towns of Cannes and Nice in the south, the industrial city of Lille in the north and Strasbourg to the east.

In Évreux, 60 miles west of Paris, shops, businesses, a post office and two schools were destroyed, along with at least 50 vehicles, in Saturday night's most concentrated attacks. Five police officers and three firefighters were injured in clashes with young rioters, a national police spokesman said.

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