Some 900 cars burned during Trump’s Paris visit

Such scenes have become a regular feature of Arab and African neighbourhoods in Paris each year for Bastille Day celebrations. Clashes ensued in the French capital’s migrant-dominated suburbs once again with 13 security force members wounded and 897 cars burned.

In the migrant-dominated Sevran in Seine-Saint-Denis, a policeman opened fire in the early hours of Saturday morning after he was lynched “by some 30 individuals who decided to attack him with maximal violence”, ACTU17 reported.

The officer tried to scare away his attackers, some of whom were wielding iron bars. The policeman was rescued just in time by reinforcements and taken to hospital, with his face bloodied, and suffering multiple bruises, while one of the assailants was hit in the abdomen.

Saint-Denis is not only France’s most immigrant-dense area, but also has one of the highest unemployment rates for youths, double the national average.

In 2013, staff at Saint Denis’s employment agency went on strike, complaining that each of the 20 counsellors had a case-load of over 500 applicants to deal with. “Twenty percent of them do not speak French,” one reportedly said. “There is, sadly, not a lot we can do for them.”

According to the French interior ministry, the total of 945, which included cars that were either “totally destroyed” or “more lightly affected”, amounted to a 17 per cent rise compared to last year.

This year, the number of cars burned were up from Bastille Day celebrations in 2016, when 855 vehicles were torched. On New Year’s Eve, 2017, an arson rampage resulted in 945 parked cars being set on fire. The numbers sparked a row over whether the government was being truthful about the figures as the ministry had chosen to release a much lower figure of 650 cars torched, Le Monde, the national daily newspaper, said. The daily said that the government was only reporting on the cars that were “directly” torched, ignoring those that caught fire nearby from leaping flames.

The French Interior Ministry said 368 people were detained and placed in custody for public violence on the nights of 13 and 14 July. “It is thanks to the large mobilisation of our security forces that there has been a significant reduction of the number of violent incidents, especially those involving fighting on the streets, committed on the fringes of the July 14 festivities,” Pierre-Henry Brandet, the spokesman for the Ministry of the Interior said.

“Our security forces have been the target of intolerable attacks in the course of several instances of urban violence,” he said, confirming that 13 police officers and soldiers were wounded during the intervention.

“The perpetrators will have to face up to their actions in court, as will the people who carried out torchings of vehicles — incidents of which there were clearly too many,” Brandet added.

The sinister annual “tradition” started in Strasbourg, eastern France in the 1990s, in the the city’s high-immigrant districts. It quickly caught on in cities across the country, and is seen as a litmus test of general social unrest in immigrant-dense areas.