Student protests rage across France as PM holds crisis meeting

A masked protester throws a garbage bin into a fire set up by high school and university students in a street amid clashes with French riot police in Saint-Denis near Paris, France, Thursday. Abdul Saboor/Reuters

Student protesters started fires in at least two French schools on Thursday, while teachers were inadvertently splashed with petrol at a third, officials said, amid increasingly violent clashes over staff shortages and dilapidated buildings.

At Marseille’s Victor Hugo high school, the teachers were inadvertently splashed as a student attempted to throw gasoline into a trash bin, local authorities said. Earlier the prosecutor’s office had said the teachers had been assaulted and “doused in petrol.”