PARIS, Oct 17: France on Wednesday unveiled a memorial to Algerians killed during the bloody police repression of a march in central Paris 40 years ago, in the latest public acknowledgement of the nation’s troubled colonial past.

Socialist Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoe became the first official publicly to recognise the massacre of October 17, 1961, during which witnesses said police hurled protesters into the River Seine in scenes they later said defied belief.

A Communist junior minister described the killing of a still-unknown number of protesters as a “state crime”.

“It is no longer possible... to ignore that there was crime covered up by the highest authorities of state,” said junior heritage minister Michel Duffour.

Far-right parties and police unions condemned the memorial as inappropriate and “anti-French”.

Witnesses to the 1961 massacre said police fired live bullets into the crowd and herded 12,000 demonstrators into sports stadiums where some were tortured.

Initial government reports in 1961 said three people died during the protests, called by Algeria’s National Liberation Front against a curfew imposed on French Muslims because of Algeria’s 1954-1962 battle against French colonial rule.

A judicial inquiry in 1999 revised the number of victims to “at least 48”, but some human rights activists say the toll may have run into the hundreds.

France has only recently started confronting the wounds of the Algerian war, reopened by the publication earlier this year of the memoirs of a retired French general admitting to the torture and assassination of Algerian revolutionaries.

Proving that feelings about the war remain strong, most opposition politicians stormed out of parliament during question time on Wednesday after a Communist deputy said the 1961 protest had been triggered by a curfew based on skin colour.

Delanoe on Wednesday unveiled a plaque opposite national police headquarters near the Saint-Michel bridge, where many of the protesters were thrown to their death.

Riot police kept several dozen far-right protesters at bay.

The anti-immigration National Front condemned “the anti-French aggression which the plaque represents” while the National Republican Movement said it was “a real provocation towards the French and an insult to France”.—Reuters