Seven arrested in Switzerland after violence inspired by French riots

Berlin: Seven people were detained, most of them teenagers, after several shop windows in the Swiss city of Lausanne were smashed as young people gathered in an "echo" of riots in neighbouring France, police said Sunday.

More than 100 people gathered in downtown Lausanne, in French-speaking western Switzerland, on Saturday evening, police said in a statement.

Several shop windows and a shop door were broken, while officers dispersed youths who threw paving stones and a Molotov cocktail at them, police said. They detained six people ages 15 to 17 - three girls and three boys, with Portuguese, Somali, Bosnian, Swiss, Georgian and Serbian citizenship - and a 24-year-old Swiss man.


No police officers were injured.

On Thursday, about a dozen people were detained in the Belgian capital, Brussels, and several fires were brought under control.