Europe

Europe

NIreland police face fresh riots in Belfast

22 June 2011 01:52 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. Northern Ireland police were dealing with a second night of attacks from rioters in east Belfast Tuesday, where sectarian rioting saw two people shot and homes attacked with gasoline bombs the previous night, APA reports quoting news.yahoo.com website.

Police said they were advising motorists to avoid the area, where it said a large crowd was gathering. British broadcasters showed video in which groups of hooded and masked men pelted stones and missiles at each other, with many attacking police vans.

The BBC said large numbers of police were on standby with water cannons.

The news came after tensions flared Monday night in Short Strand, a small Catholic community in a predominantly Protestant area of Belfast. About 500 people were involved in the street violence, which began when masked members of the Ulster Volunteer Force â€” a paramilitary Protestant group â€” attacked homes with bricks, fireworks and smoke bombs, police said.

Shots were fired from both sides, though two bullet marks on a police car were blamed on the UVF, which claimed to have disarmed fully in 2009. Two men were being treated for gunshot wounds to the leg, police said.

Catholic leaders said the violence was unprovoked, but Protestant leaders said the Protestant mob appeared to be retaliating for smaller-scale attacks by Short Strand youths on Protestant homes the night before.

Northern Ireland First Minister Peter Robinson condemned the riot, which came as a separate bomb attack from dissident republicans targeted police in west Belfast early Tuesday.

The area affected by Monday’s rioting was just one of more than 30 parts of Belfast where high barricades separate Irish Catholic and British Protestant turf. Such barricades, called "peace lines" locally, have grown in number and size, despite the success of Northern Ireland’s 1998 peace accord.

Sectarian tensions typically flare in the build-up to July 12, a divisive holiday when tens of thousands of Protestants from the Orange Order brotherhood march across Northern Ireland.