French President Nicolas Sarkozy has pledged to punish rioters who shot at police but sought to ease tensions with an independent probe into the deaths of two youths that triggered the unrest. Youths in Paris suburbs and southwestern Toulouse torched several cars and rubbish bins in the third night of tension, but a police clampdown in the Paris area brought a sharp drop in violence from the two previous nights.

Officials reported no major clashes between police and youths in the northern Paris suburbs, areas with mixed white, North African and African populations that suffer from poor housing, high unemployment and crime.

Moments after arriving back in France from China, Sarkozy sped off to a hospital in the Eaubonne suburb of Paris where a senior police officer, attacked at the start of the violence on Sunday, was being treated for serious injuries.

Sarkozy, a law-and-order hardliner when he was interior minister during riots two years ago, praised the officer's courage and said nothing could justify such violence. "Those who take it upon themselves to shoot at police will find themselves in the Assizes Court" which handles serious cases, he told reporters later.

Shooting at police "has a name -- attempted murder." The violence has revived memories of the riots in 2005, the worst unrest in France in 40 years, when thousands of cars were torched after two teenagers were accidentally electrocuted in a power sub-station after apparently fleeing police.

The new wave of violence erupted on Sunday when two teenagers on a moped were killed in a crash with a police car. A spokesman for the families said the pair, who are French, would be buried in their parents' homelands -- Morocco and Senegal.