France protests: Nearly 100 arrested on fifth night of unrest

Paris: At least 78 people were arrested across France, including 20 in Paris, following unrest after the death of the teenager, who was fatally shot by a police officer in a Paris suburb, BFMTV reported.

BFM TV is a 24-hour rolling news and weather channel based in France and available globally via digital, cable and satellite television. The situation seemed calmer on Sunday with 45,000 gendarmes and police mobilized in the country after five consecutive nights of riots.
France has been rocked by a wave of protests following the death of Nahel Merzouk, a 17-year-old of Algerian descent who was shot by a police officer in Nanterre earlier in the week.

Earlier on Sunday, the grandmother of the teenager appealed to protesters to end the violence and said that they should not damage schools or buses, CNN reported.

While talking with CNN's affiliate BFMTV, the victim's grandmother requested the protesters on Sunday and said, "They should not damage the schools, not break the buses, it was the moms who take the buses."

"I'm tired," the grandmother said, adding that Nahel's mother, "doesn't have a life anymore."

On Sunday, the mayor of a Paris suburb said his home was attacked, calling it "an assassination attempt" on his family, as per reported by CNN.

"At 1:30 am, while I was at the city hall like the past three nights, individuals rammed their car upon my residence before setting fire to it to burn my house, inside which my wife and my two young children slept," said Mayor Vincent Jeanbrun of L'Hay-les-Roses, a commune in the southern suburbs of Paris, in a statement.

"While trying to protect the children and escape the attackers, my wife and one of my children were injured."

Jeanbrun said that he had "no words strong enough to describe his emotion towards the horror of this night" and thanked police and rescue services for their help, CNN reported.

The Creteil prosecutor's office has classified the incident as an "attempted murder," prosecutor Stephane Hardouin told reporters on Sunday.

Since the protest started on Tuesday, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said on Saturday that most of the detained people are minors. The minister added that the average age of the more than 2,000 detainees is 17 years old.