Vehicles and homes set alight as anti-immigration violence flares over Norther

Anti-immigrant protesters in the UK have taken to the streets on Tuesday, after a 30-year-old man believed to be from Sudan was charged with attempted murder following a knife attack in Northern Ireland that Prime Minister Keir Starmer condemned as “horrific.”

Masked crowds gathered in various parts of Belfast on Tuesday evening, setting houses, a bus, cars and barricades on fire.

Social media video verified by CNN shows homes in the Northern Irish capital engulfed in flames as an emergency vehicle and firefighters run down the street. Tensions also boiled over in the neighboring town of Newtown Abbey, where protesters set two cars alight, according to video geolocated by CNN, and in Kilkeel where another car was set on fire.

Protests have also been reported across the water in other cities in England, Wales and Scotland.

Multiple people were forced to flee their homes in north Belfast on Tuesday evening, after the properties were set alight amid the outbreak of violence, according to the BBC.

Northern Ireland First Minister Michelle O’Neill said groups of masked men were “burning families out of their homes” in scenes of “outright thuggery.”

The protests flared after local police said Tuesday they had charged a man with attempted murder over the knife attack, which left another man hospitalized with wounds to his eyes, back and face.

The knife attack, which took place on Monday night in northern Belfast, was filmed by a witness and has since gone viral on social media. In the footage, a man can be seen pinning a visibly bloodied man to the ground and attacking him multiple times before bystanders and police officers intervened.

Anti-immigrant and right-wing accounts on social media, particularly X, seized on the video, with many calling for protests.

Multiple Northern Ireland leaders have since condemned the violence that broke out on the streets.

“The attack in North Belfast was heinous and wrong. But there are dangerous attempts to exploit that to target and attack innocent people who are simply trying to live, work and raise their families here,” First Minister O’Neill posted to X.

“Racism, intimidation and violence are wrong wherever they occur.”

Starmer called Monday night’s knife attack “horrific” and “sickening,” adding that he had “absolutely no tolerance for abhorrent scenes of violence like this on our streets.”