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The street furniture was used in Bayonne during clashes against the police presence on August 24, 2019. REUTERS / Sergio Perez

Hundreds of people demonstrated Saturday at the end of the day on the streets of Bayonne, 8 kilometers from Biarritz where the G7 is held, before being dispersed by a very important police device, which made use of water cannons and tear gas.

Protesters, including many young people, sporadically chanted slogans anti-capitalist or hostile to the police, wandering the streets of Bayonne, random police stops on their course. After clashes with police in different parts of the city, protesters were forced to retreat to pedestrian streets in the center, where they ended up facing a dam on a bridge again.

For more than an hour of face-to-face contact, the police repeatedly used tear gas and at least one de-encircling grenade.
Around 8:30 pm, the event was being dispersed.

For several days, rumors ran about the organization of an unauthorized demonstration on the sidelines of the G7, near Biarritz, surrounded by law enforcement. The prefect of the department of the Pyrénées-Atlantiques had reinforced Friday night the perimeter of protection, compared to the device which had been envisaged mid-August, extending it to a large part of the center of Bayonne (50 000 inhabitants), with increased power of control and search of the police in this area.

As early as Friday, Bayonne traders began to protect their windows with wooden panels and, on Saturday, Bayonne presented the appearance of a dead city, protected by a very strong police presence, helped by some reinforcements from the German police.

By midday, however, an anti-G7 demonstration , authorized by the authorities, had taken place in a calm environment, from Hendaye to the Spanish border town of Irun, 4 km away, gathering 15,000 people according to the organizers, 9,000 according to the authorities.

For Sunday, several anti-G7 organizations have organized a new event to be held in the morning in Bayonne, "a march of portraits" where should be collected all official portraits of President Emmanuel Macron who have been landed in town halls for several months . Seven other "pacifist gatherings" are also scheduled to take place in the middle of the day in neighboring cities of Biarritz to symbolically "encircle" the G7.

► 68 arrests and 38 police custody

In total, sixty-eight people were arrested this Saturday as part of the security, and 38 of them were placed in custody, said the prefecture of Pyrénées-Atlantiques, without specifying on the place or the context of the arrests. The police custody intervened "in particular for participation in a group to commit violence or degrading, possession of objects that could be used as a weapon by destination, face concealment and projectile throwing," said the prefecture. She also did not report any injuries at the end of the unauthorized demonstration that gave rise to brief clashes Saturday night in Bayonne.

(With AFP)