A 15-year-old loses a hand in Lens as school protests enter a third week

A 15-year-old boy lost a hand in Lens on Monday morning during a confrontation between police and school demonstrators, the prefect of Pas-de-Calais said. François-Xavier Lauch called it a very serious incident, said the boy's life was not in danger, and said he had been moved quickly to a nearby hospital. Regional paper La Voix du Nord reported that he had also lost part of his lower arm.

How the munition reached him is disputed in the first accounts. AFP, citing a police union source, said the student appeared to have picked up a sting-ball grenade that riot police had fired, and that it exploded in his hand. La Voix du Nord quoted a girl who said she was standing near him: he did not pick it up, she said, and he did not catch it. Lens mayor Sylvain Robert told French media he had seen video of the aftermath and had not seen how the police or the students organised the moment itself. He said the circumstances still had to be clarified.

A sting-ball grenade is a dispersal weapon. It is designed to burst and throw rubber pellets, not to be handled. French police have used them for years at street protests. They have also been linked to severe hand and foot injuries when a grenade lands and someone reaches for it, or when it detonates closer than the thrower intended. The Lens case will turn on a few seconds of video that the mayor says he has not watched in full, and on whether the grenade was fired into a crowd of school students or thrown back.

The confrontation sits in the third week of school protests across France. Students have blocked lycées and marched over education policy and, in several cities, over policing of earlier marches. Lauch's statement places Monday's injury at a school in Lens, an old mining town in the north, not at a national demonstration in Paris. That localises the file: a prefect, a mayor, a hospital, and a police unit whose union has already offered an account.

The two public versions cannot both be complete. If the boy picked up a spent or smoking grenade, the police union account points at a handling error after a lawful firing. If he never touched it, as the girl told La Voix du Nord, the grenade detonated against him without that step, and the question moves to where it was thrown and how close the line of students was. Robert's refusal to choose between those versions is the most precise official comment available. He has seen the aftermath. He has not seen the throw.

No charge had been announced by Monday afternoon. The prefect's immediate claim was medical: the boy is alive, and he was transferred fast. The judicial claim will belong to the prosecutor in Béthune or Arras, once the grenade type, the unit that fired it, and the video are on a desk. French inquiries into police munitions at protests have often taken months and have often ended in a finding that the rule on distance was or was not met. Lens does not yet have that finding.

The protests will continue while that file is built. A third week of school blockades already has one irreversible injury on the record. The next march in Lens will happen in a town that has a hospital report, a disputed grenade, and a mayor who says he is waiting for the pictures that show the throw rather than the blood.