French President Emmanuel Macron took in an Elton John concert in Paris as violent riots and looting raged across the country over the police shooting of a 17-year-old delivery driver, who was given a Muslim burial at a service Saturday attended by hundreds of mourners.
More than 1,300 people were arrested Friday night, with hundreds of others already detained as 45,000 police deployed following four nights of protests that turned parts of the country into civil war zones after Tuesday’s police shooting of the driver, Nahel Merzouk, at a traffic stop in Nanterre, a suburb of Paris.
The youth’s mother, identified only as Mounia, told a local television station that she blamed only the police officer who shot her son, who was buried at a mosque in Nanterre amid heavy police presence.
“I don’t blame the police, I blame one person, the one who took my son’s life,” she told France 5 Friday.
Tensions were still so high Saturday that Macron cancelled a state visit to Germany slated for Sunday as opposition politicians blasted him for attending the concert Wednesday, and called on the government to shut down social media platforms to prevent protestors from sharing violent images of burning cars and buildings and confrontations with riot police online.
“We need to shut down SnapChat and TikTok,” said Franck Louvrier, the mayor of La Baule and former federal cabinet minister who headed the government’s response to similar riots in France in 2005 under the government of Nicolas Sarkozy, in an interview with Le Point.
Three weeks of rioting were sparked in the fall of 2005 after the electrocution deaths of Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré, who were hiding from police in a power station.
Earlier in the week, as fires raged across the country for a second night, Macron and his wife Brigitte attended the British singer’s concert at the Accor Arena in Paris.
Macron was seen dancing at the event, and John and his husband, David Furnish, posted a photo on Thursday showing them meeting with the first couple with the caption “Backstage in Paris.”
That photo was apparently deleted from Furnish’s Instagram after the criticism arose.
Opposition politician Thierry Mariani, a member of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, described the French president as “totally irresponsible … While France was on fire, Macron preferred to applaud Elton John.”
The police officer who fired the fatal shot on the teenager, who is of Algerian and Moroccan descent, was charged with voluntary homicide after an investigator led prosecutor Pascal Prache noted that “the conditions for the legal use of the weapon were not met.”
