A 16-year-old French boy lost two fingers to a grenade during school riots that burned two dozen campuses, injured nearly 90 teachers, and left more than a thousand people wounded.
The Sun reported that the boy was hurt outside Couffignal high school in Strasbourg earlier this morning and rushed to hospital in a state of absolute emergency.
Police said two fingers were torn off “with his own mortar fire.” The account places the blast on the protester’s device.
The unrest is over school conditions. It has already shut more than half the nation’s schools, put hundreds of officers in the casualty count, and pushed parents into the streets to pull their own children out of the chaos.
More than a quarter of a million people took to the streets on Tuesday. That day alone helped push the injury total past 1,000.
Authorities have arrested 6,629 people since the crisis began. A majority of those arrested are minors.
At least 1,065 people have been wounded. That figure includes 761 police officers.
In Paris and Marseilles, protesters torched classrooms and pelted officers with rocks and bottles. Flares lit the clashes. Dozens of teachers and pupils were also hurt.
Parents have responded by dragging teens away from the protests. The images are blunt: adults hauling minors out of crowds that have already produced mass arrests and serious injuries.
Earlier this week in Lens, in northern France, a 15-year-old pupil had his hand blown off by a stun grenade fired by police. The hand was amputated after the Monday injury.
The boy’s mother spoke to BFMTV. She rejected claims that her son picked the device up off the ground.
She told the outlet:
“His future is ruined.”
She added:
“What happened to my son is horrible, we’re still in shock.”
And she pressed the point further:
“A lot of lies are circulating; my son didn’t pick up the grenade from the ground. He was hit with a weapon of war; it’s not normal to use that against young people.”
The officer who fired that grenade has been suspended. A further 18 officers are under investigation for using excessive violence against rioters.
One senior minister said “the police response was too harsh and lacking empathy.”
Today the French government suspended the use of stun grenades.
Education minister Édouard Geffray laid out the damage to the school system itself.
He said 24 schools were so badly burned they will not be able to reopen for several weeks.
He also said 89 teachers have been injured, with many of them “deliberately targeted.”
More than half of the nation’s schools have been shut down during the crisis. Related counts have put the closure wave as high as 500 campuses.
That is the scale: burned buildings, targeted teachers, hundreds of wounded officers, thousands of arrests dominated by minors, and teenagers leaving protests missing fingers and hands.
Police used tear gas and stun grenades. Protesters answered with rocks, bottles, torched classrooms, and, in the Strasbourg case, what police called mortar fire from their own side.
Both the Lens amputation and the Strasbourg finger injuries landed inside the same spiral. One side points to police force. The other points to riot tools in the hands of teenagers. The casualty lists keep growing either way.
Teachers were not bystanders. Geffray’s tally of 89 injured educators, many deliberately targeted, sits beside the 761 wounded officers and the schools too charred to reopen.
The government moved to suspend stun grenades after the Lens case and the political blowback. An officer is already off the line. Eighteen more face probes. A senior minister called the police response too harsh.
None of that rebuilds a burned classroom or restores a missing hand.
When half a country’s schools go dark and kids lose body parts in the street, the adults who run the system own the wreckage.
