Eleven individuals, including an aide to a French far-left lawmaker, have been arrested in France on suspicion of involvement in the killing of a far-right activist. The arrests were carried out overnight and into Wednesday morning.
Following the announcement, the Paris headquarters of the hard-left France Unbowed (LFI) party received a bomb threat, leading to an evacuation. Police secured the scene, and an all-clear was subsequently given.
Far-right activist Quentin Deranque, 23, died on Saturday after being beaten by hard-left activists outside a conference centre in Lyon where Rima Hassan, an LFI member of the European Parliament, was speaking.
An autopsy found that Deranque suffered a fractured skull and fatal brain injuries, according to Lyon’s prosecutor, Thierry Dran.
Videos of the confrontation were widely shared on social media. Hassan and other members of the LFI have condemned the killing.
The Lyon prosecutors’ office, which has opened a murder investigation, said 11 suspects have been detained so far. Among them is an aide to LFI lawmaker Raphael Arnault, who said on Tuesday that the aide had “stopped all parliamentary work”.
“It is now up to the investigation to determine responsibility,” Arnault said on X.
Both the hard left and hard right have been capitalising on frustration with the minority centrist government ahead of local elections next month and a presidential vote next year, set to take place in a highly polarised environment.
Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, the LFI’s national coordinator Manuel Bompard said his party was in no way responsible for Deranque’s death, and that it now felt threatened itself.
Jordan Bardella, party president of the far-right National Rally, has accused LFI leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon of opening the “doors of the National Assembly to presumed murderers”.
Violence has long been a feature of France’s long history of political upheaval, including during so-called “yellow vest” anti-government protests in 2019 that saw months of rioting and clashes with police during Macron’s first term.France’s broad political spectrum has long included far-left and far-right factions that harbor intense, sometimes violent disregard for each other, although deaths in clashes between them have been rare in recent decades.