**PARIS, Nov. 2 – Clashes between angry youths and French police spread to at least six Paris suburbs Tuesday night, with police firing tear gas and rubber-coated bullets at street fighters who lobbed Molotov cocktails and burned cars and trash bins.
The clashes began last Thursday after two African Muslim teenagers were electrocuted to death in the northeastern suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois while trying to evade police. On Sunday, as the street fighting continued, a police tear gas canister landed inside a mosque during Ramadan prayers, further inflaming the impoverished communities.**
**Adel Benna tried to put himself in the shoes of his shy 17-year-old brother, Ziad, and two teenage friends who scaled a wall and leapt into the cables of a power substation last Thursday evening – willing to face electrocution rather than the French police officers they were trying to evade in this impoverished Paris suburb.
“Young people don’t just throw themselves into an electrical current,” Benna said Tuesday, his voice trembling in anger. “They looked behind them and saw something that made them so terrified, so desperate, they did it out of absolute fear. I hate the police. They are responsible for my brother’s death.”**
Ziad Benna and his friend Bouna Traore, 15, sons of working-class African Muslim immigrants, were both electrocuted. A third youth survived.
It set off five days of rioting, firebombing and car burning that continued here Tuesday.
Many residents were outraged Sunday night when a police tear gas canister was thrown into a local mosque during prayers for Ramadan, the Muslim holy month. An estimated 700 coughing and panicked worshipers ran for the doors.
Residents accused the police of deliberately attacking the mosque. French officials said they were investigating the incident, which occurred during police skirmishes with youths near the place of worship, a white concrete box of a building attached to a small grocery.
The violence focused criticism on Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, a prominent candidate in the 2007 presidential stakes. The week before the youths’ deaths, he had announced “a war without mercy” on crime in the Paris suburbs.
Sarkozy, who has also called for affirmative action programs, fumbled in his initial response to the violence. He at first referred to the two dead boys as juvenile delinquents who were wanted in connection with a robbery, then amended that to say they were suspected of vandalizing a construction site.
On Monday, during a visit to the nearby police station, he said the youths were “not criminals” and had no criminal records, and promised a full investigation so that “everyone will know the truth.”
“My brother paid the price of zero tolerance with his life,” Adel Benna, brother of one of the dead youths, said in an interview, referring to Sarkozy’s anti-crime mantra.
According to Adel Benna, his brother and two other friends had been playing a game of pickup soccer and were on their way home to break the daily Ramadan fast last Thursday when they spotted a police checkpoint. Officers there were demanding identity papers, a common tactic in the high-crime neighborhoods of the Paris suburbs.
Witnesses told the family that police began chasing the boys, according to Benna and other relatives. French officials have given several versions of the incident, with some officials saying that although the youths were not pursued by police, they believed they were being chased, and panicked. The teenager who survived, the son of Turkish immigrants, is undergoing surgery for severe burns, according to family members.
In a memorial march for the two youths over the weekend, a group of friends and neighbors wore white T-shirts emblazoned with the French words for “Dead for nothing.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/02/AR2005110200492_2.html
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France the so called nation of freedom shows its intolerant face yet again, if its not banning women from wearing headscarves its treating its minorities like criminals!**
