The French interior minister was dispatched to Nice on Tuesday to appeal to shopkeepers to let justice take its course after hundreds protested over the detention of a jeweller who shot and killed an escaping robber, reports The Guardian.
Stephan Turk, 67, was confined at home with an electronic bracelet after the shooting last week that left the teenager dead outside Turk's jewellery store in the French Riviera city. An accomplice escaped on a motorbike.
"Even when faced with the unbearable, we have to let justice prevail," the interior minister, Manuel Valls, said.
Jewellers in southern France say they are being targeted increasingly by thieves and lack the resources to protect themselves. "It was a difficult situation. I don't know how I would have reacted myself," Yan Turk, the son of the jeweller, told the Nice Matin paper.
"I don't endorse what he did, but he had been beaten and threatened with death … we've had it with being targeted by robbers."
Read more of this AP report published by The Guardian.