Four thousand extra police were being drafted into restive French suburbs, police said, as a new armed attack on a bus near Paris was reported. The move came on the one-year anniversary of the death of two teenagers which sent a wave of urban riots surging through France, sparking the country's most serious social crisis in 30 years.
"Four thousand police have been made available and will reinforce local personnel in order to ensure the security of citizens in sensitive districts," a national police headquarters spokesman said.
They will be used "in accordance with events on the ground", the spokesman said, adding that their presence will be "discreet but reactive and effective."
Police also said two masked men attacked a bus outside the train station at Blanc-Mesnil, in the violence-prone Seine Saint Denis region, forcing the driver and passengers to get out then setting the vehicle on fire, in the fifth such incident in 48 hours.
Police said the men were armed but did not specify the weapons used. They had spread petrol in the vehicle then set it alight.
The bus company said the driver and the 15 or so passengers aboard were not harmed.
After starting the fire, the men disengaged the vehicle's brake and allowed it to roll down a hill where it crashed into a barrier on a bend in the road, near to homes, according to witnesses.
Authorities are on high alert for a new flare-up of violence after youth gangs, some carrying handguns, torched -- and in one case hijacked -- three buses near Paris on Wednesday.
In Clichy-sous-Bois, the poor northeast Paris suburb where the riots erupted on October 27, 2005, around 1,000 people, most of them youngsters, filed quietly Friday morning past the spot where the two boys died.
Zyed Benna, 17, and Bouna Traore, 15, both from immigrant families of African descent, were electrocuted as they hid from a police patrol in a power sub-station.
Riots broke out in Clichy that night, quickly spreading to dozens of immigrant-populated suburbs in the Paris region and beyond.
Night after night for three weeks, youth gangs clashed with police, torching more than 10,000 cars and firebombing 300 buildings in around 275 towns, until order was officially restored on November 17.
With the approach of the anniversary, police and local mayors have warned that the conditions that led to the riots remain firmly in place in the poor out-of-town neighborhoods, plagued by unemployment of 30 to 40 percent.
Nationwide, police were under orders to be vigilant but to keep their presence low-key, to avoid encouraging confrontations with youths, officers told AFP.
France's tough-talking Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy vowed Thursday following the bus attacks that the government would mobilize all the forces at its disposal for the security of public transport users.
