A 20-year-old protester was seriously injured in the hand during clashes with police at the end of a demonstration in Toulouse on Saturday 24 October, the prefecture of Haute-Garonne told AFP. The march had started calmly before the incident at the end of the procession.
During incidents in the Arènes district, west of the city centre, AFP saw firefighters evacuate an injured protester. The prefecture said that, as a gathering was being dispersed, emergency services treated one person for a serious hand injury. It said the circumstances were not known at that stage, and later said the person was a 20-year-old man. It added that investigations would be carried out under the judicial authority to establish what happened.
A street medic who treated the injured man and asked to remain anonymous said he had a serious wound to his right hand, with several fingers torn off, linked to the explosion of a device nearby.
At the end of the march, AFP reported that protesters armed with stones or bottles confronted police, who used dispersal grenades and tear gas in the same Arènes district.
The Toulouse demonstration drew 26,500 people according to the prefecture and 80,000 according to the CGT. The procession set off calmly at 2 p.m. on a loop through western Toulouse, avoiding the city centre, where shops had been damaged the previous Saturday. As in other large cities, security was reinforced to prevent further violence, with gendarmerie reinforcements, Centaure vehicles, the RAID and Sentinelle soldiers. Police carried out many preventive checks from the morning, including of arrivals at Matabiau station, near the starting point. Anyone wishing to enter Place du Capitole, protected by barriers and many police officers and CRS, had to have their bags checked. A curfew has been in force in central Toulouse from midnight to 5 a.m. since Thursday evening and remains in place for the coming night.
The mobilisation took place in a tense context after several serious injuries during protests the previous weekend. On Saturday the Paris prosecutor's office said it had opened an inquiry entrusted to the IGPN concerning a photographer seriously injured by a police grenade shot on 17 October in the capital. Until then, the IGPN had opened eight inquiries into events that weekend, including two 17-year-olds seriously hurt on the margins of the mobilisation: one whose hand was torn off by a grenade in Saint-Étienne, and a young woman who was blinded in one eye in Mulhouse.