Ten years on, police to be tried for deaths provoking French riots

Nearly a decade after three weeks of nightly rioting raged across disaffected French housing projects, two police officers go on trial on Monday over the deaths of two youths that detonated the explosion of violence. Officers Sebastien Gaillemin and Stephanie Klein will face a court in Rennes on charges they failed to prevent the electrocution deaths of Bouna Traore, 15, and Zyed Benna, 17, after the pair hid from police in a high-voltage electricity transformer near their Clichy-sous-Bois housing project northeast of Paris. Benna and Traore died in the fenced-off power facility on the afternoon of October 27, 2005 as police milled nearby. News of Benna and Traore's deaths ignited the pent-up rage of younger Clichy residents over poor living conditions, discrimination, economic deprivation, police harassment and general alienation in the ghetto-like projects -- areas that, nearly a decade later, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls in January said still represent "territorial, social and ethnic apartheid" within French society.

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