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Paris (AP) - your weapons are often simple - but deadly: iron bars, hammers, crutches.
And knives, of course.
Two youths were apparently killed in fighting between rival gangs in France within one day.
Both incidents occurred in the south of Paris, in the Essonne department.
Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin spoke of an "explosion" of violence between criminal gangs.
The fatal clashes horribly highlight the gang crime in the greater Paris area.
The first fatal brawl took place in Saint-Chéron on Monday.
From there it takes about an hour to get to the center of Paris by suburban train.
Around a dozen young people attack each other near a school there.
They are dressed in black and have hoods - this is how the prosecutor describes it.
14-year-old Lilibelle suffers a stab wound and later dies in hospital.
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Another youth dies less than 24 hours after her death - around 45 kilometers away.
Again, according to initial findings, it is a brawl between rival gangs that claims the young man's life.
Dozens of young people are said to have beaten each other.
In both cases there are first arrests.
The terrifying acts caused horror in France.
They come just a few weeks after a 15-year-old was seriously injured in a brutal attack in Paris and left to die on the concrete slabs of the Beaugrenelle high-rise district.
Videos showed the extent of the violence in the Yuriy case, who eventually survived.
"These brawls between gangs have increased in number, intensity and severity," says the prefect of the Essonne department, Eric Jalon, the broadcaster Franceinfo.
In 2020 there were 91 gang fights in Essonne - in the previous year there were 56. “We are dealing with more or less organized, more or less structured phenomena,” he describes the situation.
The brawls would be based on traffic routes or schools.
Locations are train stations or stops.
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But are the violent clashes increasing?
The General Directorate of Police has confirmed reports that there were 357 violent clashes between gangs across the country in 2020.
This is an increase of 24 percent compared to the previous year.
The vast majority of incidents therefore occurred in the greater Paris area.
However, the numbers are currently not as high as in years before, said Interior Minister Darmanin.
Drugs and the control of places where people are dealt are a central motive for the disputes, a security officer recently told the newspaper Le Figaro.
Unlike in the past, the gangs would then eventually challenge each other via social media such as Snapchat or Tiktok and eventually meet for fights.
For the French criminologist Alain Bauer, one reason for the violence is the loss of trust in institutions.
There is currently general social violence, he told the broadcaster Europe 1. That was also seen in the “yellow vests” protests.
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“Social networks are the big novelty”, says the sociologist Marwan Mohammed in the newspaper “Le Monde”.
However, he notes that the number of victims in Paris, for example, is low compared to major US cities.
"Le Parisien" reports, referring to the police prefecture, of three deaths in 2020. According to Mohammed, the perpetrators are mostly male adolescents with school difficulties, they are hardly integrated into society and value physical strength.
But how should this problem be solved?
It is, says Mohammed, the fundamental, but often neglected, issues that play the decisive role here: school failure, lack of prospects, integration difficulties or complicated family situations.
In the long term, a new social policy is needed.
Interior Minister Darmanin expressed himself somewhat differently after the deeds: "Society is not responsible for everything, but primarily the parents, who have a duty of authority."
© dpa-infocom, dpa: 210224-99-574811 / 2