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Protesters set up barricades, threw stones at police officers and set buildings ablaze.
According to organizers, 500,000 people took part in national demonstrations in France against police violence and for press freedom on Saturday. In the capital Paris alone, 200,000 protesters took to the streets, said an alliance of journalists’ unions and human rights organizations that had called for the “March of freedoms.” The Interior Ministry, however, spoke of 133,000 participants nationwide, 46,000 of them in Paris.
The protests in Paris and several other cities oppose a planned law with which the French government wants to criminalize certain photos or films made by police officers. They were fueled by new cases of police violence that were videotaped that week and caused horror across the country.
In Paris and Rennes there were riots on the sidelines of the protests, journalists from the AFP news agency reported. In Paris, the police used tear gas against protesters who set up barricades and threw stones at police officers. In Place de la Bastille, protesters set fire to a newsstand, the entrance to a building belonging to the French Central Bank and a neighboring brasserie. Several cars also burned in the area. Several protesters were arrested.
French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin condemned the unrest on the sidelines of the protests. Attacks on police officers at rallies were “unacceptable,” Darmanin wrote on the online service Twitter. 37 officers were injured, 23 of them in Paris.
The organizing alliance distanced itself from the violent participants in the protests and condemned the attacks on police officers. It is unacceptable that “a handful of people” disturb the peaceful demonstrations of hundreds of thousands of protesters.
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