UK calls emergency meeting over far-right riots

LONDON: UK leader Keir Starmer will hold an emergency response meeting on Monday after further far-right riots broke out across England over the weekend following the murder of three children last week, AFP reported.

The prime minister will chair a Cobra meeting, which will bring together ministers and the police to discuss how to quell the violence that first broke out in Southport, northwest England, on Tuesday, and has now seen hundreds of people arrested.

The town was the scene of last Monday’s tragedy in which three young girls were killed and five more children critically injured during a knife attack as they attended a Taylor Swift-themed dance class.

Other riots have broken out in towns and cities across the country, with anti-immigration demonstrators facing off against police, and Muslim counter-protestors in some instances.

Starmer on Sunday warned far-right protesters that they would “regret” participating in England’s worst rioting in 13 years, while his interior minister Yvette Cooper told the BBC on Monday that “there will be a reckoning”.

Police have blamed the violence on supporters and associated organisations of the English Defence League, an anti-Islam organisation founded 15 years ago whose supporters have been linked to football hooliganism.

Some of the worst violence on Sunday broke out in Rotherham, northern England, where masked demonstrators smashed several windows at a hotel that has been used to house asylum seekers.

At least 10 officers were injured, including one who was knocked unconscious, said South Yorkshire Police.

There were also large scuffles in Bolton, northwest England, and Middlesbrough, northeast England, where rioters smashed windows of houses and cars, leading to 43 arrests.

Protesters there seized a camera from an AFP crew and broke it. The journalists were not injured.

Late on Sunday, Staffordshire police said another hotel known to have sheltered asylum seekers was targeted near Birmingham.

“A large group of individuals” have been “throwing projectiles, smashing windows, starting fires and targeting police” at the hotel in the town of Tamworth, with one officer injured, said the statement.