France riots: €1.6m fund halted for policeman who killed teenager

A fund set up to help the French policeman whose killing of a 17-year-old set off riots across the country has been suspended at €1.6 million after a left-wing party asked prosecutors to outlaw it.

Jean Messiha, a hard-right television pundit, halted donations to the fund on the GoFundMe site that he opened at the weekend after Arthur Delaporte, a senior Socialist MP, wrote to the Paris prosecutor arguing that the account amounted to fraud and a breach of the peace.

The fund for the family of the 38-year-old policeman, and the rush of contributions, prompted outrage on the political left and criticism from President Macron’s administration. Élisabeth Borne, the prime minister, said the fund’s “far-right origins” had added to tension while youths, mainly of black and north African origin, were rioting.

The fund set up by Jean Messiha was subject to a claim that it amounted to a breach of the peace

FRANCOIS MORI/AP

The media have not named the officer, who is in detention on charges of the voluntary manslaughter of Nahel Merzouk, a teenager of Algerian-Moroccan background, during a traffic stop in the Paris suburb of Nanterre last week. A fund set up for Nahel has reached €330,000.

Messiha, 52, a senior French civil servant born in Egypt, said he was seeking to help the family of an officer who had only done his job. “The political system has been mobilised for Nahel but who has been mobilised for the policeman and his family?” he said on RMC radio. He said he would start a libel action against the Socialists.

Prosecutors have the power to annul the fund if they find it breaches laws on fraud and a ban on money-raising to pay for fines.

Polls have shown strong support for the police in the aftermath of the killing. A survey for le Point news site on Wednesday showed that 77 per cent of the French deemed the riots to have been “unjustifiable”. Nearly 60 per cent of people who voted for Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the radical left-wing candidate in last year’s presidential election, saw the riots as “justifiable”, the poll showed.

The racial overtones in the perception of the riots were highlighted by a row over remarks by one of the most senior members of the conservative Republicans party. Bruno Retailleau, its leader in the Senate, was accused of “crass racism” by Mélenchon’s France Unbowed party after he claimed that the young rioters, most of whom were French nationals, had undergone “a regression to their ethnic roots”.

The notion that the riots are part of an “ethnic war” is promoted by Éric Zemmour, a radical anti-Islam campaigner who is close to the organiser of the policeman’s fund.

Macron’s administration was on the defensive after he suggested that social media should be silenced during episodes of tension because of their role in amplifying emotion and organising violence in the past week’s events. Conservative politicians have called for Snapchat, TikTok and Telegram, the three platforms most used on the ethnic housing estates, to be temporarily suspended in times of strife.

“We have to think about the social networks, about the bans we’ll have to put in place. When things get out of control, we might need to be able to regulate or cut them off,” Macron told a meeting of mayors.

After the opposition accused Macron of seeking to emulate North Korea, Iran and China, his government watered down his remarks. “That could mean suspending features . . . for example, some platforms have geolocation features allowing young people to meet at a certain spot, showing [violent] scenes and how to start fires,” Olivier Véran, the government spokesman, said.