A 15-year-old loses a hand to a stun grenade at a Lens school protest

A 15-year-old boy lost his hand in Lens on Monday after picking up a police stun grenade during a school protest. François-Xavier Lauch, prefect of the Pas-de-Calais, said an inquiry had been opened. The local paper La Voix du Nord reported the cause. Reuters carried both the prefect's confirmation and the paper's account of the grenade.

Lens is a former coal town in the north, about 30 kilometres from Lille. The protest there was one site in a national student strike that entered its third week on Monday. Students have been out over buildings in poor repair and over staff shortages. Euronews, in its morning bulletin, put the number of schools fully or partly closed on Monday at 400 to 500. Reuters described the closures as hundreds, ahead of a nationwide day of student protest.

What a stun grenade does in a crowd of teenagers

French crowd-control units use grenades that burst with a loud report and a flash, meant to scatter a group rather than to strike one person. The hazard is the casing and the charge if someone picks the device up after it has been thrown and before it functions, or if it functions in a hand. Lauch did not describe the model. La Voix du Nord's account is that the boy picked one up. That sequence, if the inquiry confirms it, puts the injury on a device already on the ground, not on a direct shot.

The prefect's decision to open an inquiry is the formal step. It does not assign fault. It freezes the scene for the judicial police and for the inspectorate that reviews use of force. Interior ministry figures on grenades fired at school gates have not been published for Monday. Until they are, Lens is one confirmed injury, not a national tally.

Three weeks of closed gates

The strike has shut or partly shut several hundred schools on strike days. A closure in the French system can mean a blocked gate, a cancelled morning, or a building open only to students who cross a picket. The 400 to 500 figure from Monday's bulletin is a count of establishments, not of students. A lycée in a large town can hold more than a thousand. A collège in a small town holds a few hundred. The national headcount of students who missed class is not in the wires yet.

The complaint the students are repeating is concrete. Classrooms with water damage. Lessons cancelled because a teacher was not replaced. A repair budget that arrives after the winter. Governments in Paris have answered previous waves with emergency works lists and with reminders that blocking a school is an offence. Neither answer has ended this wave. The third week is the point at which a protest either thins, because families want the baccalauréat calendar protected, or hardens, because the images from one town travel.

Lens is now that town. A 15-year-old has lost a hand. The prefect has an inquiry. The rest of the country still has several hundred schools that did not open normally on Monday morning. The next fact that will change the story is either a charge, a suspension of a unit, or a government count of grenades used at school protests since the strike began. None of those has been published.

Parents in the Pas-de-Calais will also want the hospital detail the wires do not yet have. Which service is treating the boy. Whether the hand can be reattached. Lauch's statement did not say. La Voix du Nord's first account did not either. The public record on Monday evening is the injury, the device, the town, and an open inquiry.