France opens 'attempted murder' probe after rioters set a riot officer alight with a petrol bomb during Halloween riots in Paris
Crowds on the streets of Frankfurt on Saturday night, as around 100 rioters — some in Halloween costumes — smashed open storefronts and attacked emergency workers with Molotov cocktails amid a Gen Z cost-of-living protest that drew an estimated 8,000 demonstrators at its peak.A post shared by @NewsFokus on X showing scenes from Frankfurt am Main under the #GenZRegelt hashtag, as France separately banned Halloween masks ahead of fresh protests.Riot police on the streets of Paris. France banned Halloween masks and deployed 70,000 police and gendarmes nationwide amid warnings of "a very high risk of public disorder.Fires and smoke at Porte de Charenton, Paris, as a French officer was treated for severe burns after a Molotov cocktail struck him — an attack France's interior minister described as attempted murder.
The injured officer described to RTL radio the sensation of flames moving across his body and said he could feel "the flesh starting to sting" as the oily accelerant from the Molotov cocktail kept burning. Arrests across France totalled more than 770 after roughly 320,000 people took to the streets on Halloween, with violence breaking out in Paris, Marseille, Lyon, Toulouse and Bordeaux.
Laurent Nuñez, the French interior minister, described the scale of violence as 'extraordinary', as rioters threw incendiary devices at a group of around 15 gendarmes.
Now in their third consecutive weekend, the protests began as student marches over classroom conditions before broadening into anger over the cost of living.
Disorder has spread beyond France's borders, with paving stones hurled at Swiss security forces and looting reported in multiple German cities on the same night.
