This article doesn't provide much information so I'll post the article and the link. If anyone has more information on this, it would be much appreciated.

A French court has acquitted two police officers who were accused of contributing to the deaths of two teenagers in a blighted Paris suburb a decade ago.

 

The long-awaited and closely-watched verdict may revive memories of 2005 nationwide riots and stir up a new wave of mistrust, anger and violent protests, similar to those seen recently in the U.S.
 

The court in the western city of Rennes ruled that police officers Sebastien Gaillemin and Stephanie Klein were not responsible when two Muslim teenage boys chased by police entered a power substation to hide and were fatally electrocuted in October 2005.
 

Thousands of vehicles were torched, public buildings were burned and thousands of people were arrested in the three weeks of riots after the deaths of Bouna Traore and Zyed Benna. (AP)

http://news.yahoo.com/photos/french-police-acquitted-in-teen-deaths-that-sparked-riots-1431959105-slideshow/french-police-acquitted-in-teen-deaths-that-sparked-riots-photo-1431957333483.html

Hmm. I don't really think the court would have genuinely considered prosecuting the officers.

 

Don't know if you're still looking for info, but I'll still provide some for the sake of it.

The events happened ten years ago, in 2005. Two young teenagers were coming back from a football game, walking quietly on the streets. Then a police car pulled over, probably for an ID check or something. The teenagers got scared for some reason and started running away, before trying to hide into a power substation, which ended in them being eletrocuted. The story seems simple, but it brings several questions. Firstly, what did the teenagers do for them to feel the need to run away? Secondly, why the access to this power substation wasn't locked (which brings the question of the responsability of the electricity company)?

The thing is, after investigation, the teenagers did absolutely nothing wrong besides running away, so why did they? I personally think that either the police was indeed abusing of their power in those neighborhoods, or they were told by older people that the police was abusing of their power without witnessing it themselves, being true or not. Now, I believe that ten years is way too long for a court to bring a judgement. At this point, doesn't matter if the cops were judged guilty or innocent, after so much time it would have brought incomprehension in both cases, from both sides. Sure, according to the law, the cops did absolutely nothing wrong in this situation in particular, since they didn't push the boys into that substation, nor did they threaten them. But I believe that this should have brought an internal investigation to try to find out why those boys got so scared of the cops that they felt the need to run away.

Now I see that the website you picked your information from is slightly exaggerating the situation. No building was set on fire, only cars and trashcans, and there were some fights between rioters and anti-riot police. And there were certainly not thousands of people arrested, at most a few hundreds, over several weeks. Oh, and them being muslim has absolutely nothing to do with what happened, so I have no idea why they feel the need to precise that. Religion was never involved at any point in this case, looks like an attempt to bring more hatred on muslims to me.

Edited May 21, 201510 yr by Hystery