LONDON: Far-right protesters clashed with British police during tense rallies on Saturday as unrest linked to misinformation about a mass stabbing that killed three young girls spread across the UK.
The violence, which has seen scores of arrests across England and put Britain’s Muslim community on edge, presents the biggest challenge yet of Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s month-old premiership.
It has also put hard-right agitators linked to football hooliganism in the spotlight at a time when anti-immigration elements are enjoying some electoral success in British politics.
Demonstrators threw chairs, flares and bricks at officers in the northwestern English city of Liverpool, while scuffles between police and protesters broke out in nearby Manchester.
Merseyside Police said “a number of officers have been injured as they deal with serious disorder” in Liverpool city center.
According to the BBC, protesters smashed the windows of a hotel which has been used to house migrants in the northeastern city of Hull, where police said three officers had been injured and four people arrested.
In Belfast, Northern Ireland, fireworks were thrown amid tense exchanges between an anti-Islam group and an anti-racism rally.
In Leeds, around 150 people carrying English flags chanted, “You’re not English any more” while counter-protesters shouted “Nazi scum off our streets.” Opposing groups of protesters also faced off in the central city of Nottingham.
The skirmishes marked the fourth day of unrest in several towns and cities in the wake of Monday’s frenzied knife attack in Southport, near Liverpool on England’s northwest coast.
They were fueled by false rumors on social media about the background of British-born 17-year-old suspect Axel Rudakubana, charged with several counts of murder and attempted murder over the attack at a Taylor Swift-themed dance party.
Rudakubana is accused of killing Bebe King, six, Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, and Alice Dasilva Aguiar, nine, and injuring another 10 people.
Starmer has accused “thugs” of “hijacking” the nation’s grief to “sow hatred” and pledged that anyone carrying out violent acts would “face the full force of the law.”
Violence first rocked Southport late on Tuesday, where a mob threw bricks at a mosque, prompting hundreds of Muslim places of worship across the country to step up security amid fears of more anti-Islamic demonstrations.
Police blamed supporters and associated organizations of the disbanded English Defense League, an anti-Islam organization founded 15 years ago whose supporters have been linked to football hooliganism.
Unrest then rocked the northern cities of Hartlepool and Manchester as well as London 24 hours later, where 111 people were arrested outside Starmer’s Downing Street residence.
On Friday, 10 people were arrested and four officers required hospital treatment following a riot in the northeastern English city of Sunderland in which at least one car was set on fire and a shop looted.
A mob also torched a police station and attacked a mosque.
“This was not a protest, this was unforgivable violence and disorder,” Northumbria Police Chief Superintendent Mark Hall told reporters Saturday.
Anti-racism campaign group Hope Not Hate identified more than 30 events planned for Saturday and Sunday.
Many of them were advertised on far-right social media channels as “enough is enough” anti-immigrant rallies, while anti-fascism groups stage numerous counter-protests.
In London, demonstrators attending a regular pro-Palestinian march appeared undeterred by a separate anti-immigration protest.
“My parents told me not to come today but I am from here. The UK is my home,” 24-year-old student Meraaj Harun told AFP.
British media reported that government ministers were due to meet later Saturday to discuss the potential for further widespread disorder.
Starmer has announced new measures that will allow the sharing of intelligence, wider deployment of facial-recognition technology and criminal behavior orders to restrict troublemakers from traveling.
Labour politicians have accused Reform UK party leader Nigel Farage of stoking the trouble.
At last month’s election, his anti-immigrant Reform UK party captured 14 percent of the vote — one of the largest vote shares for a far-right British party.
Far-right protesters clash with police as UK unrest spreads
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Far-right protesters clash with police as UK unrest spreads
- The violence has put Britain’s Muslim community on edge and presents the biggest challenge yet of Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s month-old premiership
Afghanistan says it thwarted Pakistani airstrike on Bagram Air Base as fighting enters fourth day
- The fighting has been the most severe between the neighbors for years
- Pakistan accuses Taliban government of harboring militant groups that stage attacks against it
KABUL: Afghanistan thwarted attempted airstrikes on Bagram Air Base, the former US military base north of Kabul, authorities said Sunday, while cross-border fighting between Pakistan and Afghanistan stretched into a fourth day.
The fighting has been the most severe between the neighbors for years, with Pakistan declaring that it’s in “open war” with Afghanistan.
The conflict has alarmed the international community, particularly as the area is one where other militant organizations, including Al-Qaeda and the Daesh group, still have a presence and have been trying to resurface.
Pakistan accuses Afghanistan’s Taliban government of harboring militant groups that stage attacks against it and also of allying with its archrival India.
Border clashes in October killed dozens of soldiers, civilians and suspected militants until a Qatari-mediated ceasefire ended the intense fighting. But several rounds of peace talks in Turkiye in November failed to produce a lasting agreement, and the two sides have occasionally traded fire since then.
On Sunday, the police headquarters of Parwan province, where Bagram is located, said in a statement that several Pakistani military jets had entered Afghan airspace “and attempted to bomb Bagram Air Base” at around 5 a.m.
The statement said Afghan forces responded with “anti-aircraft and missile defense systems” and had managed to thwart the attack.
There was no immediate response from Pakistan’s military or government regarding Kabul’s claim of attempted airstrikes on Bagram or the ongoing fighting.
Bagram was the United States’ largest military base in Afghanistan. It was taken over by the Taliban as they swept across the country and took control in the wake of the chaotic US withdrawal from the country in 2021. Last year, US President Donald Trump suggested he wanted to reestablish a US presence at the base.
The current fighting began when Afghanistan launched a broad cross-border attack on Thursday night, saying it was in retaliation for Pakistani airstrikes the previous Sunday.
Pakistan had said its airstrike had targeted the outlawed Pakistani Taliban, also known as Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP. Afghanistan had said only civilians were killed.
The TTP militant group, which is separate but closely allied with Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban, operates inside Pakistan, where it has been blamed for hundreds of deaths in bombings and other attacks over the years.
Pakistan accuses Afghanistan’s Taliban government of providing a safe haven within Afghanistan for the TTP, an accusation that Afghanistan denies.
After Thursday’s Afghan attack, Pakistani Defense Minister Khawaja Mohammad Asif declared that “our patience has now run out. Now it is open war between us.”
In the ongoing fighting, each side claims to have killed hundreds of the other side’s forces — and both governments put their own casualties at drastically lower numbers.
Two Pakistani security officials said that Pakistani ground forces were still in control on Sunday of a key Afghan post and a 32-square-kilometer area in the southern Zhob sector near Kandahar province, after having seized it during fighting Friday. The captured post and surrounding area remain under Pakistani control, they added. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity, because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly.
In Kabul, the Afghan government rejected Pakistan’s claims. Deputy government spokesman Hamdullah Fitrat called the reports “baseless.”
Afghan officials said that fighting had continued overnight and into Sunday in the border areas.
The police command spokesman for Nangarhar province, Said Tayyeb Hammad, said that anti-aircraft missiles were used from the provincial capital, Jalalabad, and surrounding areas on Pakistani fighter jets flying overhead Sunday morning.
Defense Ministry spokesman Enayatulah Khowarazmi said that Afghan forces had launched counterattacks with snipers across the border from Nangarhar, Paktia, Khost and Kandahar provinces overnight. He said that two Pakistani drones had been shot down and dozens of Pakistani soldiers had been killed.
Fitrat said that Pakistani drone attacks hit civilian homes in Nangarhar province late Saturday, killing a woman and a child, while mortar fire killed another civilian when it hit a home in Paktia province.
There was no immediate response to the claims from Pakistani officials.
