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France has suspended police use of stun grenades at high school student protests, after a 15-year-old lost a hand and allegations of police brutality mounted.
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Interior Minister Laurent Nunez announced the move on RTL radio early on Wednesday. The teenager was injured on Monday after police fired a stun grenade.
“I am suspending their use in the high school student protests until the facts of the incident have been clarified,” Nunez said. He stressed that the suspension applied only to those protests and would last just long enough to establish what happened.
Police have opened 18 internal investigations into alleged misconduct since the protests began, he said. An officer was charged on Tuesday after a 14-year-old in northwest Paris was hit in the face by a tear gas grenade last week at such close range that he lost several teeth.
More than 6,500 people, most of them minors, have been arrested since the movement began in late September, when students started blockading high schools over dilapidated facilities and teacher shortages. Hundreds of students, police and teaching staff have been injured.
A quarter of a million people demonstrated across France on Tuesday, the interior ministry said, with at least 488 arrests and 43 members of the security forces wounded.
Lawyers for detained teenagers say their clients have faced violence and insults. Prisca Ancion of the Collective for Judicial Action told AFP that every high schooler arrested reported experiencing “an insult, a slap, having their head held down on the ground, chokeholds.”
“It took several children being maimed for life for Nunez to give up using grenades against high school students,” said Manuel Bompard, national coordinator of the hard-left France Unbowed (LFI). The government has blamed LFI for stoking tensions.
President Emmanuel Macron held an emergency meeting with Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu and key ministers on Tuesday evening. Lecornu, who is due to speak on the protests later on Wednesday, wrote on X: “The voice of high school students is precious and must be heard.”
Several national education unions have called for new strikes and demonstrations on Thursday.
Additional sources • AFP
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