W hen a Belfast man went to check his house was safe after rioters set fire to a hijacked bus on Tuesday night, a masked mob threatened him.
“They thought I was a foreigner. They said I was a Paki bastard but I’m from here, I grew up here,” says the 23-year-old in a thick Belfast accent, not wanting to give his name.
Bullied for years because of the “colour of his skin”, the father of one shrugged his shoulders.
“I’m well used to it,” he says.
The man stood outside his terraced home in Lendrick Street off the Newtownards Road in east Belfast on Wednesday morning where workmen boarded up multiple houses set alight during a night of disorder .
Television camera crews lined the area, which resembled a war zone by dawn, capturing pictures that evoked the worst years of Northern Ireland’s Troubles.
Images of this street engulfed in flames made international headlines in a week when anti-immigrant protests erupted into violence across the North.
Masked demonstrators blocked streets from 7pm on Tuesday following a knife attack in north Belfast on Monday.
Graphic video footage of the stabbing incident went viral on social media. Elon Musk, the provocative US-based trillionaire owner of social media network X, and anti-immigration and far-right activist Tommy Robinson – whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon – were among high-profile figures sharing lists of locations directing demonstrators to where protests could take place.
Musk retweeted a post by Rupert Lowe, the leader of the nationalist Restore Britain party, saying “millions must go”, with a screengrab of the Belfast knife attack, in which the victim was left with serious life-changing injuries, including the loss of an eye.
Footage showed several people, including a man wielding a hurl, confronting the attacker on Kinnaird Avenue off the Antrim Road, a nationalist area of the city, until police arrived at 10.30pm.
Within hours of Sudanese national Hadi Alodid (30) being charged with the attempted murder of Stephen Ogilvie, rioters had burned out cars and torched migrant homes and businesses.
Police confirmed in a press conference how Alodid had come to Northern Ireland; he made his way from Sudan to Paris before flying to Dublin and then travelled by bus to Belfast in February 2023.
“Foreigners out! Foreigners out!” was shouted by a crowd of balaclava-clad men in a north Belfast street as they petrol-bombed houses before 11pm on Tuesday.
Children and pensioners locked themselves into bathrooms for protection.
There was a night of violence in Belfast following a knife attack that left one man critically injured. Video: Reuters/Enda O'Dowd/Andrew McNair Journalists and photographers were told to “get the f**k out” by rioters as we approached the burning Glider bus on the Newtownards Road in east Belfast earlier that evening; one photographer had his shins kicked and mobile phone stamped on by a mob.
The violence spilt into a second day .
Belfast shut down by teatime on Wednesday in advance of another night of violent clashes.
Schools closed before noon, businesses sent workers home and public transport was suspended.
The attacks had a more disruptive impact on a smaller group.
Twenty-seven people – the youngest a two-month-old baby – were left homeless by the vandalism. A photograph of a migrant child being placed in the back of a Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) Land Rover with their family was discussed at Westminster, where British prime minister Keir Starmer condemned the “intolerable, sickening actions of racists”.
On Wednesday evening, masked men chased a nurse and intimidated her on her way to work in the Ulster Hospital in Dundonald to the east of Belfast, where she stayed on and finished her shift.
Overseas staff at Whiteabbey hospital in Co Antrim received threats. Workers living close to Belfast City Hospital – where the North’s regional cancer centre is based – had threatening letters put through their letterboxes.
“Racist, mindless, vile thugs” were blamed for the attacks by PSNI Chief Constable Jon Boutcher who said the unrest reached levels not seen since “the worst possible days of the Troubles”.
Rioting was confined to loyalist areas but police said there was “no evidence” that loyalist paramilitaries had orchestrated the violence “at this stage”.
Police were in little doubt, however, about the role of social media in driving the unrest. There was “significant co-ordination” from “online social media activity” from within the North and “outside the island of Ireland”, said the police.
“That momentum, that drive, that toxicity, is what’s bringing people out on to the streets [and] needs to stop,” said PSNI assistant chief constable Ryan Henderson on Thursday.
It is the third summer in a row of anti-migrant violence in the North.
Race-related riots in Ballymena last summer were triggered by an alleged rape of a girl by two Romanian teenagers. Charges against the two boys were dropped last November.
Riots in South Belfast following th…
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