🇫🇷 Jean-Luc Mélenchon blamed television commentators for stoking the racism behind last week's deadly shooting in Trappes, telling residents of the Paris suburb that racism "is not a spontaneous feeling" but "a fabrication injected from the outside." For a week before the attack, the leader of the left-wing France Insoumise said, pundits ran images of burning cities "from morning to night" while blaming "Arabs, North Africans and Blacks" for looted shops. The gunman told investigators he wanted to avenge looted shopkeepers. Responding to reports that the suspect has psychiatric problems, Mélenchon said it was "from the very first day that racism nested within him that he became mentally disturbed." Islamophobia and anti-Black racism are "crimes," not "ideas like any other," Mélenchon said. He vowed that in the "New France" he wants to build, racists will be stripped of any position of authority. Pengo Bossio Wangi, 26, "did nothing but pass by," Mélenchon said, killed "for the sole reason" that the gunman "saw that he was Black." He also read out the first names of the five wounded: Maroa, Samba, Ibrahima, Ahed and Ramatou, who is 12.

🇫🇷 French authorities moved Kevin T., the 39-year-old accused of a racist shooting spree west of Paris, to a psychiatric unit on Sunday, suspending his police custody for up to 48 hours of observation. He killed Pengo Bossio Wangi, a 26-year-old French amateur mixed martial arts fighter of African origin, and wounded five others, including a 12-year-old girl who was shot eight times and remains in critical condition. Kevin T. told investigators he targeted "Black people and Arabs" when he opened fire from his car in Trappes and neighboring La Verrière, near Versailles, on Friday, Le Monde reported. He said he wanted to avenge shopkeepers whose stores were looted during the Oct. 17 protests. Police found a copy of Mein Kampf in his apartment, which was booby-trapped with gas cylinders wired to a timer, and a submachine gun in his car. He also tested positive for cocaine and cannabis.