Over 1,000 cars torched in France over new year

The French Interior Ministry says over a thousand cars were set on fire across France during the deadly New Year’s Eve holiday.

Interior Minister Manuel Valls said on Wednesday that 1,067 vehicles were torched in France over New Year’s Eve 2013.

Three people also died due to fatal stab wounds, authorities said.

This is while, some 53,000 policemen were deployed across the country to try to curtail any violence.

The last published figure of burned cars was 1,193 for New Year’s Eve in 2013.

The French government under former president Nicolas Sarkozy did not publish the numbers of burned vehicles on New Year’s Eve in 2010 and 2011 in an attempt to reduce crime.

Authorities discovered that the published figures fueled competition between rival gang members in different districts.

Last year, however, Minister Valls had promised to publish the figures again.

The act of burning vehicles is a tradition that originated in the region around the city of Strasbourg in eastern France during the 1990s as a way to mark the arrival of the New Year.

Car torching in France does not only occur on the last day of the year. It has also been an expression of protest by despairing youths in poor French neighborhoods.

In the fall of 2005, police figures showed that 8,810 vehicles were torched in less than three weeks during nationwide unrest triggered by poor youths frustrated with high unemployment and police harassment and brutality.

France’s national statistics agency INSEE said on December 5, 2013 that the total number of the unemployed people in France hit a 16-year high in the third quarter of 2013 to 10.9 percent.