A mob of around 80 people attacked a police station in Champigny-sur-Marne on Sunday evening, pelting the building with projectiles and fireworks following the arrest of a man at a local football match.
The attack took place at around 9 pm on Sunday evening when a mob estimated to be between fifty and eighty people targetted the police station with mortar fireworks and other projectiles that were thrown at the building. Officers were said to have responded to the violence with around a dozen tear gas canisters.
An arrest at a local football match is believed to have sparked the attack on the police station when the man being arrested expressed discomfort, which police say was faked and gave the impression to others that officers had been overly violent with the man, Actu17 reports.
Reda Belhaj, departmental secretary of the union Unité SGP Police FO, commented on the violence saying, “All this is becoming really worrying,” and added, “this is the second attack on this police station in the space of 15 days. It becomes gratuitous violence. There are fewer and fewer personnel and more and more attacks. We cannot accept that our colleagues cannot work safely.”
French Police Station Attacked On Successive Nights With Molotov Cocktails, Fireworks https://t.co/c8zz7nxOn4
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) July 17, 2019
Another incident took place at a French police station just prior to the weekend on Friday in Avignon and saw a man on the S-file terrorist watchlist storm into a local police station while yelling “Allahu Akbar” before he was taken into custody.
The 35-year-old, who is said to be a radical Islamist, is also known to have psychiatric problems and is said not to have been taking his medication when needed. While he was initially questioned, local prosecutors later dismissed the case.
Attacks on French police stations and police officers themselves are not uncommon in France in recent years, such as an incident in 2019 in which a police station was attacked for two nights in a row in Les Ulis after a football victory by the Algerian national team.
Anti-police violence has become so prevalent that last year an estimated 35,000 police officers and citizens supporting them took to the streets of Paris to demonstrate against the issue and demand the government do more to tackle the problem.
Man Claiming to Be Former ISIS Fighter Arrested for Threatening French Police https://t.co/5ib34w3xL3
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) September 28, 2021
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