Part of the squalid camp in Pierrefitte-sur-Seine, outside Paris, where Roma teenager Darius used to live. A gruesome vigilante assault on the teenager has shocked France, with President Hollande dubbing the savage beating an ‘unspeakable and unjustifiable’ act.

DPA/AFP/Paris

French President Francois Hollande has condemned an “unspeakable” attack on a Roma teenager, who was beaten and left for dead in a Paris suburb by a mob who accused him of a burglary.
The 16-year-old youth named Darius was found unconscious in a discarded shopping trolley in the suburb of Pierrefitte-sur-Seine on Friday.
He was rushed to hospital, where he was still fighting for his life yesterday.
Police sources told French media he had been abducted and beaten by a group of youths from a housing project next to which he and his family were living in a squat.
“A group of several people came to find him and take him away by force,” a police source said on Monday, adding the boy was then locked in a basement where he was beaten.
Another source close to the case said about “a dozen people” took part in the attack.
It was the boy’s mother who alerted police that her son had been kidnapped.
A judicial source, also requesting anonymity, said that the boy’s “life is in danger. He is in a coma”.
Michel Fourcade, the mayor of Pierrefitte-sur-Seine, said the boy had been questioned by police several times this month in connection with a string of robberies in the housing project.
This had fuelled anger towards the Roma, an ethnic minority also known as Gypsies, whose presence in illegal camps on the fringes of towns and cities has often spurred controversy in France where they are accused of being behind a rise in petty crime.
Ion Vardu, who lives next to the Roma camp in Pierrefitte-sur-Seine, said that some 200 members of the traditionally nomadic community had arrived “three weeks ago”.
On Monday the camp lay abandoned, rubbish, clothing and mattresses strewn in the garden after the Romas’ rapid departure following the attack on the teenager.
“They left immediately,” said Vardu.
“These acts are unspeakable and unjustifiable. They violate the principles on which our republic is founded,” Hollande said in a statement, demanding “everything be done” to bring the attackers to justice.
Prime Minister Manuel Valls, who took a hard line on the Roma in his previous role as interior minister, also condemned the attack.
The conservative opposition and far-right National Front had yet to react to the incident.
Pierrefitte-sur-Seine is in the gritty, densely populated Seine-Saint-Denis district, where large Roma camps have sprung up over the last decade.
Mayor Fourcade told France Info that residents of the Cite des Poetes housing project were “exasperated” after several cars in the neighbourhood had been vandalised and several apartments burgled.
France is home to an estimated 20,000 Roma, most of whom come from Bulgaria or Romania.
Hostility toward the community has grown sharply in recent years, in tandem with the economic crisis.
Some anti-racism campaigners have linked the trend to remarks by politicians stigmatising the Roma.
The Romeurope association said that the attack was “the terrifying consequence of years of ineffective public policy and remarks by politicians, officials and journalists and media outlets that maintain and seek to harness this unhealthy [social] climate”.
Roma have long been discriminated against across Europe.
They were killed in their hundreds of thousands by the Nazis during World War II, and even now rights organisations have warned of a spike in violence against Roma communities in Europe.
France’s SOS Racisme said the attack was the “obvious result of nauseating tensions faced by our fellow citizens”.
“We expect a radical change in discourse and an extremely clear denunciation of the violence they are facing,” said Benjamin Abtan, head of the European Grassroots Antiracist Movement (EGAM).
An April report by Amnesty International slammed European countries for not doing enough to protect their Roma communities, singling out several nations including France.
Many of France’s 20,000 Roma live in extreme poverty in makeshift settlements with little or no access to basic services, such as water, Amnesty said.
The country pursues a controversial policy of forcibly evicting Roma from their camps, often paying them to return to their countries of origin, mainly Romania and Bulgaria.
Last year, French authorities evicted a record 19,380 members of the community from their camps.
The issue gained international attention and sparked nationwide student protests in October after authorities took a 15-year-old Roma girl off a bus in front of her classmates during a school trip and deported her along with her family to Kosovo.
Valls, as interior minister at the time, also came under stinging criticism a month earlier when he said most Roma in France had no intention of integrating and should be sent back to their countries of origin.