PARIS (Reuters) - Dozens of youths clashed with police and set fire to buildings in a Paris suburb on Sunday after two teenagers were killed in a crash with a police car.
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The pair were riding on a stolen motorcycle when the accident happened on Sunday in the town of Villiers-le-Bel, north of Paris, a police union source said.
France’s worst urban unrest in 40 years broke out in the northeastern Paris suburb of Clichy-Sous-Bois in November 2005, after two teenagers died electrocuted in an electricity sub-station after apparently fleeing police.
The circumstances in this case, however, were different.
“It was not a chase but apparently a traffic accident,” a police source said.
The town’s police station caught fire and that of the neighbouring town, Arnouville-les-Gonesse, was ransacked, the local authority said.
A Villiers garage was set ablaze and fires were put out before they could spread in a neighbouring garage and a petrol station in the same town.
“The situation is tense tonight. We do not know how it will evolve during the night,” the mayor’s chief of staff, Nicolas Carrier, told Reuters.
Large numbers of police were sent to the town from neighbouring departments and Paris.
“We made (police) immediately available for a dramatic situation in which two young people died and there has been damage and thefts,” a local authority official said.
“There are small groups of vandals who have started to loot shops,” the official said, adding that a young person had been arrested.
The local authority said seven policemen and a fireman were injured. A police officer who went to the scene was attacked by youths who had gathered there.
Several rubbish bins were torched and the burned out wreckage of a car was visible on French television footage.
Strasbourg during the 2005 civil unrest in France. 
In six hours, dozens of young people in Sarcelles and Villiers-le-Bel, a suburb of Paris, France, attacked a police station, burned cars and broke into shops after two teenagers were killed in a car crash with a police vehicle. The station was pelted with Molotov cocktails and guns were fired at officers inside the station.

A police captain, who tried to negotiate with the youths, had to be hospitalized with serious injuries to the face. The youths also set several cars ablaze. According to police, at least 21 officers were injured in rioting in Villiers-le-Bel and Arnouville. The police station in Villiers-le-Bel was set on fire and the one in Arnouville was ransacked.

Two hours before, a police patrol vehicle collided with two teenagers riding a stolen green mini cross motorbike without helmets. The teens, aged 15 and 16, were both killed in the accident which took place in Villiers-le-Bel.

Didier Vaillant, mayor of Villers-le-Bel, appealed for calm and assured there will be "an impartial investigation, for full light to be shed" on the accident. 

Omar Sehhouli, brother to one of the dead teenagers, said the unrest "was not violence but an expression of rage."