A 26-year-old French student was described as "between life and death" in a Marseille hospital yesterday after over 70 per cent of her body was burned in a copycat bus-burning on Saturday night.
France was horrified by the attack, the ninth in a week, which coincided with the first anniversary of the onset of three weeks of race riots last year. Though security forces are struggling to maintain calm in the immigrant suburbs, tension runs high amid fears that the violence will escalate as it did last year.
Mama Galledou, whose family are from Senegal, was on the 32 bus in north Marseille at 9pm on Saturday when four teenagers wearing "hoodies" pried open the back door of the vehicle and threw Molotov cocktails inside. Seven passengers escaped uninjured. Four were hospitalised for smoke inhalation. If Ms Galledou survives, she will suffer permanent disabilities.
Witnesses described the assailants as being no more than 15 years old. They had tried to board the bus earlier, between stops, but the woman bus driver refused to open the door.
Police described the attack as "premeditated". In earlier bus-burnings, passengers and drivers were allowed to flee before the vehicles were set alight.
President Jacques Chirac called the bus-burning "an ignoble act". He telephoned the victim's family "and assured them everything would be done to find the criminals and punish them with the utmost severity," a statement from the Élysée Palace said. Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin will hold an emergency meeting on safety in public transport this morning.
The Socialist party leader Francois Hollande blamed interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy for the violence in the suburbs. Mr Sarkozy, who had already deployed an extra 4,000 police and gendarmes to protect transport over the anniversary weekend, yesterday sent two extra companies of riot police to Marseille. National Police headquarters described Friday night, the anniversary of the beginning of the riots, as "relatively calm". Nearly 300 vehicles were burned across France, three times the number destroyed on a "normal" night, but far less than the peak of 1,400 torchings during last year's riots. A police source told the Journal du dimanche that youths in the suburbs were inspired by media coverage of a day-time bus-burning in Grigny, south of Paris, on October 22nd. "For these young people, anyone can burn a car, but burning a bus is more prestigious," he said.
Residents of the banlieues say circumstances have not improved over the past year. Clichy-sous-Bois, where the rioting started after two teenagers were electrocuted in a power substation, still does not have a police commissariat.
