 "France unrest: Policeman who killed teen says sorry as violence intensifies")
The cop who killed a 17-year-old boy during a traffic stop on Tuesday has apologised to the family while in custody, his lawyer said. “The first words he pronounced were to say sorry and the last words he said were to say sorry to the family,” Laurent-Franck Lienard told BFMTV late Thursday. “He is devastated, he doesn’t get up in the morning to kill people,” Lienard said. “He didn’t want to kill him.” At least one hundred and fifty people were arrested in France on Thursday after a second night of unrest across the country following the fatal shooting by police of a 17-year-old boy during a traffic stop. Lienard said the policeman was “extremely shocked by the violence of this video”. The officer has been charged with voluntary homicide and remanded in custody. Lienard said he would on Friday appeal his client being placed in custody. Concern over the situation, President Emmanuel Macron had convened a crisis meeting with senior ministers on Thursday after riots spread across France overnight over the deadly police shooting of a teenager of North African descent during a traffic stop.
A video shared on social media, verified by Reuters, shows two police officers beside a car, a Mercedes AMG, with one shooting at the teenage driver at close range as he pulls away. He died shortly afterwards from his wounds, the local prosecutor said. The interior ministry had said Wednesday that 2,000 police had been mobilised in the Paris region. Shortly before midnight on Nanterre’s Avenue Pablo Picasso, a trail of overturned vehicles burned as fireworks fizzed at police lines. Police also clashed with protesters in the northern city of Lille and in Toulouse in the southwest, and there was unrest in Amiens, Dijon as well as in numerous districts throughout the greater Paris region, the authorities said. A police officer is being investigated for voluntary homicide for shooting the youth. Prosecutors say the boy failed to comply with an order to stop his car. Rights groups allege systemic racism inside law enforcement agencies in France, a charge Macron has previously denied.
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