Paris, Nov. 25 (Reuters): Dozens of youths clashed with police and set fire to buildings in a Paris suburb yesterday after two teenagers were killed in a crash with a police car.

The pair were riding on a stolen motorcycle when the accident happened yesterday in the town of Villiers-le-Bel, north of Paris, a police union source said.

Today in Beijing, French Prime Minister Nicolas Sarkozy called for calm. “I call on everyone to calm down and let the justice system decide who was responsible,” Sarkozy said.

Police launched an investigation into the deaths which will focus on whether the two officers helped the dying youths, amid complaints from locals that they fled the scene after the incident.

France’s worst urban unrest in 40 years broke out in the northeastern Paris suburb of Clichy-Sous-Bois in November 2005, after two teenagers died electrocuted in an electricity sub-station after apparently fleeing police.

The circumstances in this case, however, were different.

“It was not a chase but apparently a traffic accident,” a police source said.

The town’s police station caught fire and that of the neighbouring town, Arnouville-les-Gonesse, was ransacked, the local authority said. A Villiers garage was set ablaze and fires were put out before they could spread in a neighbouring garage and a petrol station in the same town.

“The situation is tense. We do not know how it will evolve during the night,” the mayor’s chief of staff, Nicolas Carrier, said. Large numbers of policemen were sent to the town from Paris.