Northern Ireland, anti-migrant anger explodes

The British media, for their part, recall the precedent - much more extensive - of the riots that broke out last summer in various locations in the Kingdom following a massacre of little girls, stabbed near Liverpool (Northern England) by a 17-year-old son of Rwandan refugees. An incident that had already ignited the flames in Northern Ireland.

In this case, the trigger was the complaint of sexual assault against a local girl and the subsequent arrest over the weekend of two teenagers who appeared yesterday before a local court judge to validate their arrest. Against the backdrop of a climate of emotion and anger among the townspeople, which degenerated in the evening when it became known that during the hearing, the defenders of the two suspects had requested the intervention of a Romanian interpreter.

Last night's riots thus resulted in a night of terror for the small local Romanian community, including throwing objects, attacks on various properties, shattered windows, kicked doors, and besieged families with children: forced to barricade themselves wherever possible in the face of the pogrom animated by a more brutal fringe of demonstrators.

Fringe who then challenged with Molotov bottles, paint, clubs and various materials the same officers, who intervened in force to bring the situation under control. Not without public security vehicles set on fire, as shown by the infernal images of fire and smoke reflected in some of the videos shot in the streets of a provincial town with a total of just over 30,000 inhabitants: a town grappling with social problems of poverty and marginality, as well as the legacy of past inter-faith violence. And with relatively new phenomena of migration.