The mayor of a Paris suburb has said his home was attacked early Sunday morning, calling it “an assassination attempt” on his family amid ongoing unrest in the country, reports CNN.
“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,” said mayor Vincent Jeanbrun of L’Haÿ-les-Roses, a commune in the southern suburbs of Paris, in a statement.
“While trying to protect the children and escape the attackers, my wife and one of my children were injured.”
Jeanbrun said that he had “no words strong enough to describe his emotion towards the horror of this night” and thanked police and rescue services for their help.
France has been rocked by a wave of protests following the death of Nahel Merzouk, a 17-year-old of Algerian descent who was shot by a police officer in Nanterre earlier in the week and whose funeral took place on Saturday at a mosque in Nanterre amid a heavy security presence.
The youth’s death has reignited a debate on policing in France’s marginalized communities and raised questions over whether race was a factor in his death.