Paris suburb mayor's family attacked in fifth night of protests across France

The house of the mayor of a suburb of Paris was attacked over the weekend in the midst of the nationwide protests in France against the killing of a teenager.

According to local media reports, the attackers tried to set Mayor Vincent Jeanbrun's house on fire and even fired rockets at officials trying to help his wife and children flee the violent scene.

His wife has suffered a leg injury, and one of his two children has also suffered an injury. Jeanbrun is the mayor of L'Haÿ-les-Roses, a commune in the southern suburbs of Paris.

He has called the attack "an assassination attempt" on his family. In a statement issued after the incident, he elaborated on the events that transpired at his home early Sunday morning.

"At 1:30 a.m., 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," read the statement.

He further said that he had "no words strong enough to describe his emotion towards the horror of this night." According to police, the attackers rammed a car through the gates of his house and set the vehicle ablaze.

His wife and two children, aged 5 and 7, had to flee through the back garden to save their lives. An investigation into the incident has been launched by the prosecutor's office.

Why is France burning?

The incident has caused widespread fear and comes against the backdrop of the violent demonstrations being witnessed in France over the last five days. The violent protests erupted after the death of a teenager named Nahel Merzouk. He was shot by police at point-blank range during a traffic stop in Nanterre, a Paris suburb.

Merzouk, a 17-year-old boy of Algerian and Moroccan descent, was shot dead by a police officer on June 27.

He was pulled over by a police officer for reportedly running a red traffic light. The boy was driving a Mercedes with Polish licence plates and was in the bus lane when he ran the red light.

The video of the incident has gone viral on social media and shows one of the police officers firing at the boy. The officer who shot Merzouk claimed that he did so because he believed that the teen was going to run someone over, according to Nanterre prosecutor Pascal Prache.

The police officer has now been put under preliminary detention and is being investigated for his actions. Meanwhile, the situation has gotten so out of control that the teenager's grandmother issued a statement urging people not to resort to violence.

"They should not damage the schools, not break the buses, it was the moms who take the buses," she told CNN's affiliate BFMTV.

In 2017, France witnessed massive riots for two weeks after a young black man claimed that he was raped with a baton while in police custody in the Paris suburb of Aulnay-sous-Bois.

The latest protests over the killing of the teenager are the most violent demonstrations seen in France in recent years. More than 45,000 police and gendarmes have been deployed across the country to bring the situation under control.

The violence has spread to other Parisian suburbs as well. Several schools, town halls, and the headquarters of the Paris 2024 Olympics have been set on fire in the last few days. Over 3,000 people have been detained, and 719 have been arrested as police crackdown on protesters. However, the arrests and detentions have not been able to deter protesters.

The protests have now spread to neighbouring Switzerland and Belgium as well. The Swiss city of Lausanne saw clashes between the police and protesters over the weekend. Several incidents of fire were also reported from Belgium's capital, Brussels.