PARIS (Reuters) – France will step up security measures for the country’s annual July 14 Bastille Day national festival, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said on Wednesday, after the country was hit by riots following the deadly police shooting of a teenager near Paris.
Darmanin told reporters that 130,000 police would be mobilised from Thursday evening onwards. Helicopters and special police units such as the RAID and GIGN divisions would also be on standby, he added.
Riots broke out at the end of June after police shot dead Nahel M, a 17-year-old of Algerian and Moroccan descent, when the youth did not comply with an order to stop his car.
Protests over his death started in the Paris suburb of Nanterre, where he was shot, then spread rapidly to other major cities such as Lyon and Marseille.
The riots have since subsided but police fear unrest on the evening of the July 14 public holiday, known as Bastille Day to commemorate the 1789 storming of the Bastille prison – a key date in the French Revolution.
(Reporting by Sudip Kar-Gupta and Nicolas Delame; editing by Jonathan Oatis)
