Unrest In Paris Suburbs Spreads

Chirac Calls For Calm As Police Clash With Youths For Sixth Night

(AP)  In unrest Tuesday night, rioters burned 228 cars throughout France, police said. Some 153 of those were in the Seine-Saint-Denis area north of Paris, where the rioting began.

The rioting began Thursday in the northeastern suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois after the electrocutions of two teenagers hiding in a power substation because they believed police were chasing them.

Officials have said police were not pursuing the boys, aged 17 and 15.

Villepin met Tuesday evening with the parents of the three families, promising a full investigation of the deaths and insisting on "the need to restore calm."

There was a heavy police presence in Clichy-sous-Bois, which had its first calm night Tuesday since the riots began. Mayor Claude Dilain said it was "not yet a victory, because we all have the feeling that this calm could be precarious."

"If French society accepts that there are tinderboxes within its borders, it can't be surprised when they explode," he said.

In the northeastern suburb of Bondy, 14 cars were burned and four people arrested for throwing stones at police, authorities said.

An Associated Press Television News team witnessed confrontations between about 20 police and 40 youths in Aulnay-sous-Bois with police firing tear gas and rubber bullets.

Officials said that "small, very mobile gangs" were harassing police and setting fire to garbage cans and vehicles throughout the region.

France-Info radio said some 150 blazes were reported in garbage bins, cars and buildings across Seine-Saint-Denis, an area of soaring unemployment, delinquency and other urban ills.

Youths set two rooms of a primary school in Sevran on fire Monday along with several cars, Mayor Stephane Gatignon said in a statement.

A tear gas grenade that landed in the Clichy-sous-Bois mosque Sunday night fed anger, along with arrests. It was unclear who fired the tear gas.

Sarkozy, a law-and-order interior minister, said social aid to the suburbs provided over the years had been a failed tactic.

"We often accepted the unacceptable," he told Le Parisien. "The reigning order is too often the order of gangs, drugs, traffickers. The neighborhoods are waiting for firmness but also justice" and jobs.

Even within the conservative government, there were critics of Sarkozy's tough language.

Equal Opportunities Minister Azouz Begag, in an interview Tuesday in the daily Liberation, said he "contests this method of becoming submerged by imprecise, warlike semantics."

Violence first visited French suburbs in 1981, in the Lyon area. For three decades, successive governments have vainly injected funds but failed to cure suburban ills.