Riots spread in France; police added

PARIS -- Responding to the raging violence that has spread to 300 French cities and towns, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin announced last night that local officials would be empowered to impose curfews wherever they are needed. He also said that 1,500 police and gendarme reservists were being called up to reinforce the 8,000 who are already deployed to curb rioting.

Suspected copycat attacks were reported yesterday in other parts of Europe for the first time; Belgian police reported that cars had been torched outside the main train station in Brussels. Several cars were also set afire in Berlin and Bremen, both cities with substantial Muslim populations, according to German reports.

Authorities in the two countries played down the incidents as isolated hooliganism.

But leaders across Europe were watching with increasing alarm as chaos engulfed districts of France that are heavily populated by disaffected Muslims, in what is being called the ''French intifadah."

''Everybody's concerned at what's happening," Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain said.

''I send every support to the French government and to the French people in dealing with the situation," Blair said in London.

Villepin, speaking on TF1 television, called his response ''one of firmness. . . . Wherever it is necessary, prefects will be able to put in place a curfew under the authority of the interior minister, if they think it will be useful to permit a return to calm and ensure the protection of residents," he said.

Villepin added: ''That is our number-one responsibility."

He spoke after violence erupted for the 12th night, as rioters in the southern city of Toulouse took over an empty bus and set it on fire, and attacked police with firebombs and rocks.

Earlier, police said yesterday, a 61-year-old Frenchman was the first to have been killed in the violence. Jean-Jacques Le Chenadec, a retired auto worker, died of wounds received Friday when he was beaten by youths who became infuriated when he tried to put out a fire they had set in a trash can outside his house.

In Belgium, police reported that five cars had been torched in an apparent copycat attack duplicating the thousands of acts of arson by enraged Muslim youths that have rocked France, and that have stunned Europe. Brussels is headquarters for the 25-nation European Union.

German news outlets reported the torching of several vehicles and an abandoned school in the raw-knuckled port city of Bremen, south of the North Sea, and in a working-class section of Berlin. There were no arrests or direct confrontations with police, and the authorities indicated that there was no evidence that Muslims had been involved, but news media and politicians made the assumption that the incidents reflected warning signs that disturbances like those in France could come to Germany.

''We have to improve integration, particularly of young people," said Wolfgang Schaeuble, who is expected to become Germany's next interior minister when the new German government comes into power.

The violence in France -- home to Europe's largest concentration of Muslims, more than 5 million -- has been carried out by young men of Arabic and African heritage, some using the slogans of militant Islam.

''We are witnessing a sort of shock wave that is spreading across the country," Michel Gaudin, director-general of France's national police force, said at a news conference in Paris. ''This shows up in the number of towns affected."

France has detained 1,200 ''suspects" since the violence started, according to Gaudin. But substantial numbers have been released, apparently for lack of evidence or witnesses.

Belgium, Germany, Britain, the Netherlands, , and Italy also have large populations of Muslims, many of them disaffected second- and third-generation people who consider themselves victims of racial and religious prejudice. By and large, Europe's Muslims live in neighborhoods apart from the white mainstream, often in grim housing developments rife with unemployment, crime, and anger. In recent years, these sections have been fertile recruiting grounds for Islamic fundamentalist groups.

The governments of Australia, Britain, Germany, Japan, and about a dozen other countries joined the United States in urging citizens to be aware of the possible dangers of visiting France, and to avoid areas hit by violence.

But the French foreign minister, Philippe Douste-Blazy,in a meeting with other European foreign ministers in Brussels, insisted that no one should fear travelling to France. ''France is not a dangerous country. France is still a country where one can go," he said.

Last week, train service between Charles de Gaulle International Airport and central Paris was briefly suspended after trains were struck by rocks. Smoke from burning cars and shops snarled traffic along a main highway into the City of Light. And on Sunday, arsonists firebombed vehicles near the heart of the city.

Yesterday, authorities reported an escalation of attacks that have caused tens of millions of dollars in damage, as thousands of cars, hundreds of shops and restaurants, scores of schools, post offices, medical clinics, and firehouses have been destroyed.

Churches in the towns of Lens, in the north, and Sète, along the Mediterranean, were damaged by arson, according to Patrick Hamon, spokesman for France's national police force.

According to police and French press reports, Islamic militants appeared to have been playing at least some role in organizing disturbances that are still primarily the work of youth gangs and disaffected jobless young men.

In another dramatic sign that events are spiraling out of control, two police officers were hospitalized with serious facial and leg wounds, after they were wounded by shotgun blasts in an ambush late Sunday in the gritty suburb of Grigny, just outside Paris, according to law enforcement officials. Eight other officers suffered lesser wounds in the same incident.

The ambushes marked the first time that officers have been wounded by firearms since the violence first exploded in scruffy housing tracts north of Paris on Oct. 27. The catalyst for what media across Europe are calling the ''French intifadah," referring to Palestinian uprisings against Israel, was the electrocution of two Muslim teenagers who had fled into a power substation while apparently trying to avoid police.

Another 26 French police officers were injured early yesterday and late Sunday night, either in street battles with Muslim youths or while giving assistance at arson scenes. At least 1,408 vehicles were gutted across the country.

Despite pledges by President Jacques Chirac to quell the violence, it is increasingly obvious that the situation is worsening by the day.

A reporter driving through Paris's northern suburbs early yesterday found scenes straight from a war zone: gutted buildings, charred cars by the hundreds, flames blazing from what appeared to have been a ruptured gas line.

The rest of Europe has watched with dread and fascination. ''From Bordeaux to Nice, from Strasbourg to Rennes, France has been set ablaze by the embers of racial resentment," declared the Spanish newspaper ABC. ''It is too late to call the firefighters."

The Berlin newspaper Die Tageszeitung predicted that widespread violence could also explode in Germany. The countries of Europe have maintained policies of ''social apartheid," the newspaper said, by shuffling immigrant workers off into public housing estates on the periphery of major cities.

''In France, the ghettoes are particularly big and isolated," Die Tageszeitung said.

Germany has the second-largest Muslim population in Europe, roughly 3 million. But Muslims in Germany are predominantly of Turkish origin, not Arabs or Africans, and they seem more prosperous and content than Muslims in France, Britain, and the Netherlands, where imams preach messages of jihad against the West.

On Sunday, one of France's largest Muslim groups, the Union for Islamic Organizations, issued its first public statement condemning the violence in the form of a ''fatwa," or religious order, forbidding French Muslims from ''taking part in any action that blindly strikes private or public property, or can harm others."

Meanwhile, rioters burned two schools and a bus in the city of Saint-Étienne. In northern Lens and the southern city of Sète, along the Mediterranean, churches were set ablaze by fast-moving arsonists, according to the police. In Colombes, a suburb northwest of Paris, youths hurled rocks at a bus, causing serious injuries to a 13-year-old child.

Yesterday, Chirac met with the Latvian President Vaira Vike-Freiberga, who told reporters that much of the meeting had focused on the unrest spreading in France.

She said that Chirac ''deplored the fact that in these neighborhoods there is ghettoization of youths of African or North African origin" and that Chirac had acknowledged the ''incapacity of French society to fully accept them."

Petra Krischok, a news assistant in Globe's bureau in Berlin, contributed to this report.