France saw 1,457 vehicles set on fire across New Year’s Eve, surpassing the previous record of 1,290 vehicles torched across the country in the previous year, according to figures seen by French radio broadcaster Europe 1.
The figures show a 13 per cent rise in the number of car burnings from 2018, with French police allegedly attempting to keep the number of burned cars under secrecy so as not to “create an escalation”, Europe 1 reports.
French authorities have gone on record claiming that the burnings over the New Year period in 2019 were substantially less serious than the previous year and said that the number of violent incidents towards police had also decreased compared to those that occurred in 2018.
In previous years, the French authorities also remained largely silent on the official car burning figures, and when figures were reported, such as in 2017, the Interior Ministry only counted cars that were directly set on fire and not those that had received damage as a result of fires.