A housing estate in Marseille was sealed off after gunmen shot at a police vehicle hours before the French prime minister, Manuel Valls, was due to visit the city.
Residents reported that about 10 young hooded gunmen were patrolling the streets of the Castellane estate on scooters on Monday morning, looking for a rival gang and firing Kalashnikovs into the air.
When the first police vehicle arrived at the estate, another gang member who was posted inside one of the estate’s tower blocks shot at it with a rifle.
About 100 special forces police were dispatched to search the area, where about 7,000 people live. Riot police were posted at entrances to the estate and a creche was evacuated.
Later on Monday, police reportedly found seven Kalashnikovs and about 20kg of cannabis as well as a large sum of money in an apartment in Castellane. Police were still searching for the gunmen.
The gunfire happened as Pierre-Marie Bourniquel, the departmental director of public security, was checking that the area was safe before the prime minister’s visit.
Valls was due in Marseille to congratulate local officials and police on their clampdown on crime in the city. He was expected to be accompanied by the interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, and the education minister, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem.
Le Figaro reported that Bourniquel and an accompanying police chief had come under fire as they arrived at the estate in a police car with its siren on. The shots passed two or three metres from the vehicle and no one was injured.
Police said the shooting was linked to a dispute over a drug deal between two rival gangs.
Bourniquel told Agence France-Presse that he and other officers were in three vehicles that were targeted: “We were shot at when we got there. We were in clearly marked police cars.”
The 1960s housing estate where the French footballer Zinedine Zidane grew up is in one of Marseille’s notorious crime-ridden suburbs.
Drug traffickers regularly turn parts of the estate into no-go areas for police and outsiders, and local authorities plan to demolish at least one high-rise block in an attempt to make the area easier to monitor and control.
Last week the local infants’ school was broken into, and the neighbouring primary school was set alight over the Christmas period.
