Hundreds of gilets jaunes (yellow vests) on Sunday staged a “march of the mutilated” through central Paris. Among them were people seriously injured in demonstrations since the movement started in November last year.
Several had lost an eye or limb in clashes with riot police. The marchers called for an end to “repressive ultraviolence” and a ban on police use of explosive grenades and rubber bullets.
The French Ministry of the Interior estimated that 2,448 protesters and 1,797 police and gendarmes have been injured since the weekly protests began on Nov. 17.
Photo: AFP
Investigations have been launched into 174 incidents; 57 have been completed and are awaiting a decision on whether there should be legal action.
Jerome Rodrigues, one of the protesters on Sunday, had lost an eye after being hit by a flashball — or large rubber pellet — fired by police.
“Several files concern the use of flashballs. No police officer or gendarme has been put under investigation,” Rodrigues said.
The march took place on the 29th weekend of action by the yellow vests.
The ministry said there were fewer than 10,000 protesters across the nation, the lowest turnout yet.
In previous weekends there have been running battles between police and extremist elements of the yellow vests who have torched cars and smashed shops, banks and businesses.
French Junior Interior Minisetr Laurent Nunez said the government had no intention of halting the use of flashballs and he had no regrets about police using them against the protesters.
“It’s a vital weapon in situation of rioting and urban violence,” Nunez told RTL radio.
“The flashball is used every day by our police officers and gendarmes to stop public order problems, a refusal to desist and to protect themselves when their lives are in danger,” he said.
“When there is aggression against the police and a proportionate response, there may be people injured. Just because a hand has been torn off or an eye damaged doesn’t mean that this [response] is illegal. Above all, it’s important to make it clear that it’s not acceptable for police officers to be attacked in a violent manner by those wishing to express their convictions,” he said.
Paris prosecutor Remy Heitz on Thursday said eight investigations so far into the behavior of police had made a case for legal action.
“These are cases where the injuries are heavier and permanent,” Heitz said.
Investigators were looking into “illegal violence” rather than “police violence” and the cases centered on whether the police response was “illegal or disproportionate,” he said.
On the yellow vests side, Heitz said 2,907 protesters had been arrested, of whom 1,304 were released without charge and 1,357 were referred to the courts.
Fifty “more serious and complex” cases involving “violence to the police, pillaging luxury stores or damaging the Arc de Triomphe” were the subject of a full investigation.
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
RSS