(Reuters) – Cars were set on fire and masked men threw a petrol bomb at a second night of rioting in pro-British parts of Northern Ireland amid rising post-Brexit tensions in the region.
Many pro-British unionists are fiercely opposed to the new trade barriers between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK as part of Britain’s departure from the EU and have warned that their unrest could lead to violence.
Political leaders, including the British Northern Ireland minister, called for calm earlier on Saturday, but police said they were involved in reports of riots in Newtownabbey on the northern outskirts of Belfast.
A video posted on Twitter by the Police Federation for Northern Ireland showed four masked individuals throwing petrol bombs from a distance at an armored police van, which they also punched.
Fifteen officers were injured in the Sandy Row area of Belfast on Friday when a small local protest turned into a riot. Police said the gunmen attacked them with masonry, metal rods, fireworks and manholes.
The injuries included burns, head injuries and a broken leg, resulting in the arrest and indictment of seven people, two of them aged 13 and 14. Twelve officers were also wounded in a separate riot on Friday in the city of Londonderry.
Other political parties blamed Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) Prime Minister Arlene Foster on Saturday for raising tensions with their firm opposition to the new trade arrangements.
“Through their words and actions, they sent a very dangerous message to young people in loyalist areas,” said Gerry Kelly, a member of parliament for the pro-Irish Sinn Fein party, which shares power in the decentralized government with the DUP, in a statement. .
DUP MP Christopher Stalford said the rebels were “acting out of frustration” after prosecutors chose not to charge any Sinn Fein member last week for alleged violations of COVID-19 restrictions.
The DUP has called on the chief of police to resign on the issue.
The British-administered region remains deeply divided along sectarian lines, 23 years after a peace deal largely ended three decades of bloodshed. Many Catholic nationalists aspire to unification with Ireland, while Protestant unionists want to remain in Britain.
Padraic Halpin’s report to Dublin; Edited by Daniel Wallis