RENNES, France — One October afternoon, two teenage boys were kicking around a football in their housing project northeast of Paris. Two hours later, they lay lifeless, electrocuted in a power substation as they hid from police.
Two police officers wept in a hushed courtroom as they testified about what happened that day in 2005 in Clichy-sous-Bois. The boys’ deaths led to three weeks of nationwide riots by those who saw Bouna Traoré, 15, and Zyed Benna, 17, as victims of a system denying opportunity to minority youth across France.
Last week’s long-awaited trial focused on a single event in a specific Paris suburb, but the tensions that emerged in testimony echoed similar standoffs from Ferguson, Mo., to London and Stockholm, between largely white police forces and nonwhite youths.
“We are at the meeting of two worlds that don’t know each other, that don’t trust each other,” said lawyer Jean-Pierre Mignard, representing the families of the French boys killed in 2005.
The French police officers stand accused of contributing to the deaths but insist they’re not to blame. Unusually, even the prosecutor is on the officers’ side and requested acquittal for lack of evidence.
The boys’ families disagree, and the trial exposed still-raw emotions over the 2005 deaths, and a still-divided France. The verdict May 18 will be closely watched, with some fearing renewed violence in impoverished housing projects if the officers walk free. They face up to five years in prison and 75,000 euro, or $79,000, each in fines.
Since the 2005 riots, successive French governments have invested millions in renovation efforts of troubled “banlieues,” or suburbs. But a sense of injustice lingers among residents, many with roots in former French colonies in Africa. Prime Minister Manuel Valls used the term “apartheid” to describe the alienation.
Concern resurged after three radical Islamic Frenchmen from similar neighborhoods killed 17 people in January in the country’s worst terrorist attacks in decades. The three were killed in shootouts with police.
Meanwhile, the far right National Front has fueled discrimination by championing anti-immigrant and anti-Islam policies. The party came in second in nationwide local elections Sunday.
The national tensions formed the backdrop to the trial last week in Rennes, in western France, where Sebastien Gaillemin, 41, and Stephanie Klein, 38, faced charges of failing to assist a person in danger.
Gaillemin chased the teens through Clichy-sous-Bois on Oct. 27, 2005, while Klein was coordinating police radio communications.
The case centers around a phrase from Gaillemin, when he saw the boys head toward a power substation to hide: “If they enter the site, I wouldn’t pay much for their skins.”
Klein, an inexperienced police intern struggling with the tense situation, is accused of having heard Gaillemin’s phrase on the police radio and failing to alert anyone that the youths might be in danger.
