France imposed emergency measures in 38 urban suburbs, towns and cities including Paris yesterday after youths threw firebombs at police and torched hundreds of cars in a 13th night of violence.

Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin published a decree invoking a 50-year-old law that gives senior government officials the power to impose nightly curfews, although official figures showed a sharp drop in unrest.

A poll in Le Parisien newspaper showed 73 per cent support for the measures, with 86 per cent of those surveyed expressing outrage at violence which police said had destroyed another 617 vehicles, about half the number the night before.

"We are seeing a sharp drop in hostile acts," the National Police Director, Michel Gaudin, told a news briefing.

Claude Gueant, an aide to Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy who opponents accuse of stoking disorder with strong language, said the unrest appeared to have peaked.

"We have reasons to believe that wisdom will prevail in the districts affected by the violence," he told Europe 1 radio.

Major cities covered by emergency powers include Marseille, Strasbourg, Lyon and Toulouse, as well as Paris suburbs.

Police said 11,500 police had been deployed overnight to combat the most serious public disorder since protests in May 1968. Overnight, 280 people were detained.

Violence spreads to neighbors

At least nine cars were set on fire overnight in the German cities of Berlin and Cologne in suspected copycat attacks after nearly two weeks of widespread unrest in France, police said yesterday.

Police in the German capital said five cars and a motorcycle were burned in the working class north Berlin district of Wedding on Tuesday night. In Cologne, police said four cars in the Bocklemuend district were set on fire.

Five other cars were burned in Berlin's Moabit quarter two nights earlier.

In Belgium, youths set fire to vehicles in several cities for the third night on Tuesday in what officials say appeared to be an imitation of violence in France, although there were no riots and the incidents were isolated.

A car, a bus and a truck went up in flames in the port city of Antwerp, while a car was set ablaze in Ghent. Cars were also torched in the smaller towns of Lokeren and Mechelen.

"It's quite clearly a copycat case involving several youngsters relating to the events in Paris," Ghent police commissioner Steven De Smet told VRT radio.

(China Daily November 10, 2005)