Macron calls crisis meeting as France protests continue for second night

• Minister says police arrests 150 people amid nationwide protests.
• Trail of overturned vehicles burn as fireworks fizzed at police lines. 
• Protesters' clashes with police witnessed in different cities. 

PARIS: France President Emmanuel Macron on Thursday called a high-level crisis meeting as the riots spread across France overnight in the wake of the fatal police shooting of a teenager of North African descent during a traffic stop.

At least 150 people were arrested amid nationwide protests as the unrest entered a second night, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said, with public anger spilling out onto the streets, notably in the ethnically diverse suburbs of France's big cities.

The epicentre of the unrest was in Nanterre, a working-class town on the western outskirts of Paris where the shooting of the 17-year-old boy identified as Nahel took place.

"The last few hours have been marked by scenes of violence against police stations but also schools and town halls, and thus institutions of the Republic and these scenes are wholly unjustifiable," Macron said as he opened the emergency meeting.

The fatal shooting has fed into longstanding complaints of police violence from within the low-income, racially mixed suburbs that ring major cities in France.

A video shared on social media, verified by Reuters, shows two police officers beside a car, a Mercedes AMG, with one shooting at the teenage driver at close range as he pulls away. He died shortly afterwards from his wounds, the local prosecutor said.

The interior ministry had said Wednesday on that 2,000 police had been mobilised in the Paris region. Shortly before midnight on Nanterre's Avenue Pablo Picasso, a trail of overturned vehicles burned as fireworks fizzed at police lines.

Police also clashed with protesters in the northern city of Lille and in Toulouse in the southwest, and there was unrest in Amiens, Dijon as well as in numerous districts throughout the greater Paris region, the authorities said.

A police officer is being investigated for voluntary homicide for shooting the youth. Prosecutors say the boy failed to comply with an order to stop his car.

Rights groups allege systemic racism inside law enforcement agencies in France, a charge Macron has previously denied.