This 12 February 2017 French video is called (translated) [Anti-rape-by-police teeenage protester] Emmanuel saved a little girl from the flames in Bobigny yesterday; not the riot police.
From daily News Line in Britain:
Wednesday, 15 February 2017
YOUTH UPRISING IN BOBIGNY SUBURB OF PARIS
”I”M NO HERO,’ insisted 16-year-old Emmanuel Toula after he rescued a child from a burning car set alight during last Saturday night’s youth uprising in the Bobigny suburb of Paris.
Nightly youth uprisings and anti-brutality protests have spread in Parisian suburbs since a young black man, identified only as Theo, suffered a brutal attack by a group of four police officers following an ID check in Aulnay-sous-Bois, with one officer allegedly using his truncheon to rape him, on 2nd February.
On Saturday 11th February, as protesters gathered in the northern suburb near Aulnay-sous-Bois to express their anger, 16-year-old Emmanuel Toula was protesting for the first time.
He spotted a small car being surrounded by young people who had started a fire in a garbage can nearby.
A terrified woman jumped out of the car, taking her young son with her. ‘At that moment, I approached the car and I saw a little girl,’ Emmanuel said. ‘She was terrorised. I was afraid because I imagined the car could explode at any moment. I have four little brothers and two little sisters and I thought I could not leave a little girl like that.’
No one seemed to have noticed the child as the rioters started rocking the car and putting burning garbage next to it, so Emmanuel decided to ‘take my courage in both hands’. With the fire creeping up the hood, he approached the car and opened the door. The little girl looked shocked but was not crying.
‘I tried to remove her belt, my hands and arms still trembling,’ Emmanuel said. ‘Then I took her in my arms and I tried to run. But that wasn’t the end of it, as police started firing tear gas canisters in our direction. I started to pick up speed and I felt the tear gas. Deafening grenades fell two metres from us.’
Emmanuel looked for the girl’s mother and watched as the car burned up and exploded. He left the child with a policeman and continued to search for the mother, but never found her and lost both the policeman and the girl. Paris police later appeared to claim in a report that they ‘had to intervene’ to help a girl from a burning car, but Emmanuel and three witnesses, including one policeman, confirmed it was the teenager who rescued the child, the Bondy Blog reports.
‘It was a young black man who came to help a child who was still in the car while the trash was burning beside it,’ a police officer confirmed. Once the occupants evacuated, the car was turned over by rioters and ended up charred by the flames.’
Police then clarified that the phrase may have been a miscommunication at the time of the report’s publication, saying that at no time had they wished to misrepresent the role of Emmanuel Toula in the drama. A police tweet then saluted his courage – #manifestation#bobigny La préfecture de police salue le courage du jeune homme qui a sorti, hier, la fillette de la voiture en feu. – Préfecture de police (@prefpolice) February 12, 2017.
Last weekend’s protests, which had been flaring up in suburban Paris communities since February 2nd, had initially been peaceful but later several vehicles were set alight and shop windows were smashed as police and protesters clashed and police fired tear gas.
‘I identified myself with Theo because I thought that what happened to him could have happened to me,’ Toula said, explaining his reason for joining the protests. For me, it was a civic duty to be there, I had to bring my stone to the building.’ …
High unemployment and racial tension blight several struggling neighbourhoods on the outskirts of Paris – commonly called the ‘banlieues’.
Police have been accused of heavy-handed methods in areas with large immigrant populations.
Theo, a 22-year-old youth worker, said that he left his house in Aulnay-sous-Bois on Thursday 2nd February and found himself in the middle of a police identity check, targeting drug dealers. He said the police operation quickly turned violent and he was set upon by four officers.
He struggled to make sure he was in the view of CCTV cameras, and asked the officers why they were doing this to him. He said one officer proceeded to pull his trousers down and rape him with a truncheon. ‘I fell on to my stomach, I had no strength left,’ he said. He was then sprayed with tear gas around the head and in the mouth and hit over the head, he said. He said he was then sodomised with a truncheon, as well as racially abused, spat at and beaten around his genitals.
Theo was then taken to a police station where he said a ‘much friendlier’ police officer saw his condition and sent him to hospital. He has undergone emergency surgery for severe injuries, which included anal tearing, and has been declared unfit for work for 60 days. …
‘The feeling of humiliation is felt by people,’ Abdallah Benjana, a former deputy mayor who lives in the neighbourhood said. ‘What are (the police officers) seeking? To provoke a spark? Isn’t there enough gunpowder in those neighbourhoods? Unemployment, insecurity, high rents… no perspectives for future. They do that to a young man, it can only explode.’
Protests against police violence have spread across France, three weeks after the sexual assault of Théo, a 22-year-old youth, by police in Aulnay-sous-Bois, a working class suburb of Paris. Théo was hospitalised with a 10-cm wound to his rectum inflicted by a police baton: here.
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