Prime Minister David Cameron called Tuesday for an emergency session of Parliament, and announced an almost tripling of police on London streets, after the capital and other British cities burned in this nation’s worse civil disturbances in decades.
TV channels reported that riots have spread to new areas of London while looting erupted in Birmingham, Liverpool and Bristol as Britain’s worst violence in decades extended into a third night. Shops and cars were set ablaze across London late on Monday and early on Tuesday with authorities struggling to contain the unrest in the capital city.
Police said on Tuesday they had arrested more than 200 people in the worst night of unrest so far and more than 450 overall. Cameron, who cut short a vacation in Italy Monday night as the violence escalated, decried the sickening scenes of gangs of youths looting shops, setting businesses ablaze and clashing with police in neighbourhoods across London.
Effectively acknowledging that the embattled Metropolitan Police had been completely overwhelmed – images showed riot police standing by as rioters looted and set buildings ablaze – Cameron said a force some 16,000 strong would take to the streets on Tuesday evening, up from 6,000 a day earlier.
“People should be in no doubt that we will everything necessary to restore order to Britain’s streets,” Cameron said. “This is criminality pure and simple, and it must be confronted and defeated.” But Cameron did not appear to immediately embrace calls by some to send in the army or deploy water cannons against the rioters.
After more than 450 arrests, authorities said prisons in London were already reaching capacity, leading the newly detained to be shuttled to jails outside the capital. British authorities said that the Parliament will convene on Thursday to address the riots. In some neighbourhoods on Tuesday morning, normally bustling streets were eerily quiet.
Hours earlier, rampant looting and raging fires engulfed swaths of London, including a neighbourhood not far from that of the athletes’ village and shiny stadiums being built for the 2012 Olympic Games. The images of violence — with hundreds of youths looting shops, setting businesses ablaze and clashing with police in almost a dozen neighbourhoods — deeply shocked Londoners, dealing the city an enormously damaging blow less than a year before the start of the Olympics.
In the worst bout of urban violence to hit Britain in more than two decades, parts of London morphed into lawless no-man’s-lands. Gangs of youths roamed one south London neighborhood while carrying molotov cocktails, the BBC reported. And widespread looting was reported in the west London borough of Ealing after a shopping mall caught fire.
The violence spread beyond the capital, to Birmingham, the country’s second-largest city, as well as Liverpool, Bristol, Leeds and Nottingham. Overwhelmed by the scope of violence, the embattled Metropolitan Police called in reinforcements from police forces outside London.
Police use armoured vehicles – Armoured vehicles have been brought in to clear streets of London for the first time by police to tackle the worst rioting and looting. Armoured vehicles – known as Jankels – were brought in during the early hours of Tuesday morning in Clapham Junction where much of the worst looting and arson took place.
The vehicles were driven on to Lavender Hill to push back a crowd of 150 looters who had smashed up Debenhams and other stores and businesses in the area. Jankels were also out in Hackney. Their deployment brought echoes of Northern Ireland during the Troubles to the streets of the capital and marked the start of what sources say are much tougher tactics against rioters.
But a police source said the use of water cannon was a decision for government, not Scotland Yard. The use of armoured vehicles to clear rioters after hours in which it appeared the police had lost control of the streets means they will be used again if violence continues, the Yard said.
Hundreds arrested as London riots spread to new areas
