A French police report has confirmed officers chased a group of youths in a poor Paris suburb last year, leading to the deaths of two of them and sparking weeks of rioting.
The report by the Inspection Generale des Services, the police watchdog, was leaked to Le Mondenewspaper today. It concluded that officers had chased the youths and had shown "surprising irresponsibility and carelessness".
In October 2005 three teenagers in the suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois fled police before taking refuge in an electricity sub station, where two of them were electrocuted.
Officers denied chasing the boys. However, their families claimed they were chased by police into the sub station run by electricity supplier EDF.
The deaths set off angry protests and weeks of riots by stone-throwing youths who torched thousands of cars, horrifying France and laying bare the tensions in the poor, heavily immigrant suburbs outside its prosperous town centres.
Partly based on evidence from radio traffic, the police report concluded officers had pursued the three youths whom they suspected of trying to break into a building site.
During the pursuit, it found that one of the officers had seen them climb into the nearby sub station and said: "If they get into the EDF site, I don't give much for their hides."
The officer later denied to investigators that he had seen them enter the facility.
According to Le Monde, the report, which was handed over to the magistrate examining charges of "failure to provide assistance to a person in danger", gave no opinion on the guilt or otherwise of five officers questioned as witnesses.