British Prime Minister Keir Starmer convened an emergency security meeting Monday after far-right riots spread over the weekend, and residents of villages, towns and cities across the country woke up to scenes of buildings set on fire and asylum seeker hotels stormed by angry mobs.
Nearly 150 people were arrested over the weekend, U.K.’s National Police Chiefs’ Council said Sunday.
The violence followed a week of unrest that following a stabbing attack that killed three young girls in the northern city of Southport. False claims about the attacker’s motive, ethnicity and origin quickly spread online, fueling the outbursts of violence.
On Sunday, two hotels housing asylum seekers were targeted by mobs in what has turned into the worst disorder the U.K. has seen in years.
In the northern town of Rotherham, video shared by the BBC and Reuters showed protesters, some masked and carrying St. George Cross flags, which can be associated with the far right, chanting “get them out.” The crowd smashed windows of a Holiday Inn Express hotel which was being used to house asylum seekers as people inside looked on with horror.
The rioters can also be seen setting on fire plastic trash trolleys next to the hotel, and hurling planks of wood and profanities at police in riot gear on the scene.
Police in South Yorkshire, where Rotherham is, later said its officers were also targeted with glass bottles and beer cans by a crowd of about 700 people. They added that at least 10 officers were injured in the melee, with one left unconscious following a head injury, although no hotel employees or residents have been reported as hurt.
A police officer was also injured in the clashes at another Holiday Inn hotel in the town of Tamworth, north of Birmingham in the Midlands. Windows were smashed and three Molotov cocktails were used to start fires, Staffordshire Police said. Here too, projectiles were thrown at officers, resulting in one suffering a broken arm, according to the force. No one inside was injured, the police statement added.
In the town of Bolton, in the northwest of England, police were trying to keep rival demonstrators apart, with one group shouting “Allahu Akbar” at anti-immigration protesters, according to the footage shared by the BBC Sunday.
Anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim groups seized upon the child murders at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport last Monday as disinformation spread on social media that the suspected attacker was a refugee and radical Islamist.
In a desperate effort to stop the spread of misinformation, British authorities revealed that the suspect, who is a minor, was born in Britain and had lived for years in a village near Southport itself.
Starmer held an emergency response, or Cobra, attended by ministers, civil servants and police, after he condemned what he called the “far-right thuggery” behind the riots and promised that the rioters would face “full force of the law” in a televised address Sunday night.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, who oversees borders and policing, called the attack on the hotel in Rotherham “utterly appalling.”
Assistant Chief Constable Lindsey Butterfield of South Yorkshire Police on Monday pledged to find those who were at the riot and bring them to justice.
Butterfield added that during the violence in Rotherham police dogs were injured, and police horses were had bricks, eggs and bottles thrown at their heads and were spat at.
The government has also promised to offer mosques emergency security.
