“Nothing justifies the violence,” she said. “Vincent Jeanbrun has our support for these unacceptable and unqualifiable acts and the response will be at the height of these acts of violence.”
The attack on the mayor’s family shocked France and, alongside public appeals from the relatives of the 17 year-old — identified by police as Nahel — may have played a significant role in calming some of the worst political violence in recent memory.
The grandmother of Nahel appealed for calm on Sunday and said that the rioters were using his death as an excuse to cause havoc.
“I tell them to stop it. It’s mothers who take buses, it’s mothers who walk outside. We should calm things, we don’t want them to break things,” the woman identified only as Nadia told France’s BFM TV. “Nahel is dead, that’s all there is.”
Nahel, who was of Algerian descent, was killed by a single shot from a police officer during a traffic stop Tuesday morning in the Paris suburb of Nanterre. The officer accused of the killing has been given a preliminary charge of voluntary homicide.
Prosecutors said Nahel had committed a number of traffic infractions and driven through pedestrian crossings to evade police but had been forced to stop by heavy traffic, allowing officers to approach the car.
Footage filmed by bystanders showed two police officers leaning into the driver-side window of his yellow Mercedes, with one of them appearing to fire a shot as the vehicle pulls away. The car crashed into a utility post nearby and prosecutors said the driver died at the scene.
The legal team representing his family hasn’t said whether it believes race was a factor in the shooting, which has stirred long-simmering tensions between the French state and many young people with immigrant roots who say it routinely discriminates against them.
Since his death June 27, Nahel’s friends and relatives described him as a generous and kind young man who had never been given to violence.
“Everyone called him oui oui, because he’d say yes to everything,” said Anais, who described herself as the best friend of Nahel’s cousin and a close companion in his youth.
“He was a young man like everyone else,” she told NBC News in an interview last Thursday evening.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
