Security to be stepped up in Paris neighborhoods after riots

Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, after four nights of rioting in a Paris suburb, promised to step up security in France's rough neighborhoods on Monday with riot police ensuring order and intelligence agents searching out troublemakers.

During a meeting with police officers and firefighters of the Seine-Saint-Denis region, Sarkozy pointed out that residents of troubled neighborhoods would get "the security they have a right to."

Six police officers were injured and 11 people detained in a fourth consecutive night Sunday of confrontations between bands of young people and police in Clichy-Sous-Bois, northeast of Paris.

Eight cars were burned and garbage bins were set on fire, authorities said. The waves of rioting were triggered by the electrocution deaths Thursday of two teenagers, aged 15 and 17.

The young men had taken refuge in a power substation to escape police who they mistakenly feared were chasing them, officials have said, reportedly basing their information on the account of a third teenager who survived.

Sarkozy said on television Sunday night that, according to his information, police went after another group of youths and were never chasing the two. They had returned to the police station 20 minutes before the deaths.

Big city suburbs, often the home to immigrants with modest incomes, have posed growing security concerns in recent years with mounting delinquency, drug trafficking and other crimes.

Since the start of the year, 9,000 police cars have been stoned and, each night, 20 to 40 cars are torched, Sarkozy said two days before the violence in Clichy-Sous-Bois. He promised a national plan to cope with delinquency by year's end, the AP reports.

V.Y.