Oliver Conway

There are maybe six, seven policemen.

They've surrounded one young man.

They've got him up against the wall.

They're searching him.

We understand he's 18 years old.

The youngster then begs the police to arrest him so he can escape the gang.

They take him away.

The French police are making hundreds of arrests like this, but despite the crackdown, they are, it seems, losing the war against a network of chaotic gangs that are starved to some extent by a growing army of brutalized children.

We've come down into the cellar now.

Police searching for places where drugs might have been hidden.

They find cocaine, hashish, traces of a drug industry now worth up to 7 billion euros across France.

A far-right MP, Frank Alicio, talks of the need for a state of emergency.

And he blames uncontrolled immigration.

It's the number that's the problem, he says.

We're no longer able to integrate, to assimilate.

But Marseille on the Mediterranean has always been a diverse city, a city of immigrants.

The prevailing view here is that they should not be scapegoated, that teenagers running riot here and in other cities are still children, that they need, above all, rescuing from a violent industry, bringing terror to their streets.

Andrew Harding reporting from Marseille.

Four years ago, Typhoon Rai battered the Philippines, killing around 400 people and destroying hundreds of thousands of homes.

At the time, it was the most powerful storm to ever hit the archipelago.