Belfast, Northern Ireland — Violent anti-immigration protests erupted in parts of Belfast on Tuesday evening with some masked demonstrators setting fire to a bus, cars, trash cans and homes. Far-right figures had called on social media for mass protests after a brutal stabbing attack the previous night in Northern Ireland’s capital.
A graphic video of the incident, showing a man slashing another man in the head and neck with a knife, spread quickly online earlier in the day. The Police Service of Northern Ireland detained and charged a Sudanese man in his 30s with attempted murder, possession of a knife in a public place and making threats to kill.
The accused man entered Northern Ireland, a semi-autonomous region of the United Kingdom, after applying for asylum, and in 2023 he was granted a five-year U.K. visa. He is scheduled to appear in court on Wednesday to face the charges.
The victim of the attack was taken to the hospital with serious injuries to his eyes, face and back, police said.
Despite calls for calm from the police and politicians from all major parties, dozens of fully masked protesters gathered in several places Tuesday evening and caused violent unrest, with one local lawmaker from Belfast calling it “a race-based pogrom.”
Claire Hanna, a member of the British parliament from Belfast with the Social Democratic & Labour Party, told BBC’s “Newsnight” program that people were “understandably revulsed and shocked” by the stabbing, but she condemned protesters for starting fires and said some had gone door to door looking for immigrants.
BBC reporter Kelly Bonner said hundreds of masked men walked down a street on Lower Newtownards Road in Belfast carrying bottles and bricks, shouting “foreigners out” as they set trash cans alight. She said they walked down streets banging on and kicking doors and smashing windows.
“At one point I witnessed them trying to burn a car until a woman came out of her home and told them it belonged to a ‘local and not a foreigner,’ and they stopped,” Bonner reported.
Hanna said “negative actors online and politicians locally who don’t really care what communities in north Belfast have been through” had deliberately fomented the unrest online.
“What you’re seeing is a race-based pogrom,” she said, naming U.S. tech magnate Elon Musk, President Trump’s ideological ally and Reform UK party leader Nigel Farage, and British far-right activist Tommy Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, as some of the prominent figures who spread the stabbing video and called for mass protests.
Numerous social media accounts had urged people to take to the streets and “protest against mass immigration into their communities.”
Northern Ireland First Minister Michelle O’Neill called the scenes of unrest “outright thuggery.”
“Groups of masked men burning families out of their homes is nothing less than disgusting cowardice,” O’Neill said in a statement shared on social media.