The mayor of a tough Marseille neighbourhood called on Thursday for France's army to tackle armed criminals after a spate of shootings in the Mediterranean port city, in a test of President Francois Hollande's crime-fighting mettle. The appeal, which the government rejected, highlighted worsening crime in France's second-largest city, a drug-trafficking hub where an influx of weapons from eastern Europe after the Balkan wars has contributed to a rise in gun violence and tit-for-tat killings, according to Reuters. It follows the shooting deaths of two young men in less than a week in an escalating turf war between housing project drug dealers and neighbourhood kingpins which is overwhelming a poorly armed local police force. The mayor's call piled pressure on Hollande and his Interior Minister to prove that they can be tough on crime, just two weeks after riots in northern France fuelled concerns about urban unrest. The shootings, which police say were both drug-related, brought the number of murders in Marseille to 12 since January - already approaching last year's total of 13. In the wider Rhone-Alpes region, 19 people have been killed in drug-related shootings this year. Frequent attacks have exposed the erosion of public order in the ancient Mediterranean city where the once-thriving industrial port, a top employer, has steadily lost business to Rotterdam over the past decade. Economically depressed, dotted with housing projects and located on a trafficking route leading up from Spain to the rest of Europe, Marseille has long been known as a tough city. But drug-related violence has risen sharply in the past five years, as youths from the city's restive northern neighbourhoods grabbed business from career criminals and began feuding over turf, newly armed with Kalashnikov machine-guns that sell for as little as 400 euros ($500). -- SPA
