(Reuters) - Violence flared in English cities and towns on
Tuesday night but London, where thousands of extra police had been deployed,
was largely peaceful after three turbulent nights in which youths rampaged
across the capital virtually unchecked.
Groups of youths in hooded
tops fought running battles with police in Manchester in northwest England,
smashing windows and looting shops. A clothes shop was set alight.
In Salford, greater
Manchester, rioters threw bricks at police and set fire to buildings. A BBC
cameraman was attacked. Television pictures showed flames leaping from shops
and cars, and plumes of thick black smoke billowing across roads.
"Over the past few hours,
Greater Manchester Police has been faced with extraordinary levels of violence
from groups of criminals intent on committing widespread disorder,"
Assistant Chief Constable Gary Shewan said.
"These people have
nothing to protest against - there is no sense of injustice or any spark that
has led to this. It is, pure and simple, acts of criminal behavior which are
the worst I have seen on this scale."
Further south in West Bromwich
and Wolverhampton, cars were burned and stores raided. A police station was
firebombed by 30 to 40 males in Nottingham. No one was injured, police said.
In Liverpool's Toxteth
district, rioters set fire to two fire engines and a fire officer's car, police
said. Earlier, some 200 youths throwing missiles wrecked and looted shops,
causing 'disorder and damage', police said.
Police said they had arrested
47 people in Manchester and Salford, and 37 in Toxteth. There were reports of
minor disturbances in Birmingham and Leicester, in the Midlands, Milton Keynes
north of London, and Gloucester in the southwest.
In London, commuters hurried
home early, shops shut and many shopkeepers boarded their windows, preparing
nervously for more of the violence that had erupted in neighborhoods across
London and spread to other cities.
Gangs have ransacked stores,
carting off clothes, shoes and electronic goods, torched cars, shops and homes
-- causing tens of millions of pounds of damage -- and taunted the police.
But the streets of London
were quiet on Tuesday.
Community leaders said the
violence in London, the worst for decades in the huge, multi-ethnic capital,
was rooted in growing disparities in wealth and opportunity, but many rejected
the idea that anything but greed motivated rioters.
Prime Minister David Cameron,
who cut short a family holiday in Tuscany to deal with the crisis, told reporters:
"This is criminality pure and simple and it has to be confronted and
defeated."
"People should be in no
doubt that we will do everything necessary to restore order to Britain's
streets," he said after a meeting of the government's crisis committee,
COBRA.
Another such meeting was set
for Wednesday. Cameron also recalled parliament from its summer recess, a rare
move.
London police said 16,000
police officers were on the streets on Tuesday night, compared with 6,000 on
Monday night. London has a population of 7.8 million.
STRUGGLING ECONOMY
The unrest poses a new
challenge to Cameron as Britain's economy struggles to grow while his government
slashes public spending and raises taxes to cut a yawning budget deficit --
moves that some commentators say have aggravated the plight of young people in
inner cities.
It also shows the world an
ugly side of London less than a year before it hosts the 2012 Olympic Games, an
event that officials hope will serve as a showcase for the city in the way that
April's royal wedding did.
"No one should wake in
this wonderful city of ours to see such scenes of devastation and
violence," said Metropolitan Police Deputy Assistant Commissioner Steve
Kavanagh.
Police said they had arrested a
total of 685 people in London since the looting began on Saturday. More than
100 police officers were injured.
A 26-year-old man died after
being shot in Croydon, south of London, the first fatality of the riots.
Some Londoners, fearing more
trouble, took steps to defend their communities. In Southall, west London,
around 100 people gathered outside the Sikh temple in case of new rioting.
The London 2012 Organizing
Committee hosted an International Olympic Committee visit "as
planned" and said the violence would not hurt preparations for the Olympics.
But other sporting events
suffered. England canceled Wednesday's international soccer friendly with the
Netherlands and three club games were called off.
On Westminster Bridge tourists
took pictures of each other in front of the Houses of Parliament as normal,
though the crowds were thinner than usual for an August evening.
"There are more police
officers on the streets, we noticed that but we didn't see anything else and we
are kind of used to violence on the streets anyway," said Pedro, a
23-year-old Brazilian tourist. "We had a good day, went shopping...
drinking in a pub, tourist things."
PRESSURE ON POLICE
The first riots broke out on
Saturday in north London's Tottenham district, when a protest over the police
shooting of a suspect two days earlier led to violence.
Police are likely to come
under fresh pressure over that incident after a watchdog said on Tuesday there
was no evidence that a handgun retrieved by police at the scene had been fired.
Reports initially suggested Mark Duggan had shot at police before they shot and
killed him.
Tottenham includes areas with
the highest unemployment rates in London. It also has a history of racial
tension with local young people, especially blacks, resenting police behavior.
"It's us versus them,
the police, the system," said one youth at a grim housing estate in the
London district of Hackney, the epicenter of Monday night's rioting.
"They call it looting and
criminality. It's not that. There's a real hatred against the system." His
friends, some covering their faces with hoods, nodded in agreement.
Earlier Londoners rallied to
clear up neighborhoods damaged in the riots. Hundreds of volunteers carrying
brooms, dustpans, rubber gloves and black bags gathered on Tuesday in Clapham,
south of the River Thames, to help clean up.
(Additional reporting by Paul Hoskins, Adrian Croft, Avril Ormsby,
Jon Hemming, Sonya
Hepinstall,Jon Boyle,
Stefano Ambrogi, Peter
Griffiths and Georgina
Prodhan; Editing by Tim Pearce)
Source : Reuters
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