‘There’s wee girls inside’: panic as masked men storm house in Belfast

Police have declared a critical incident in Belfast after protests broke out. Photograph: Isabel Infantes/Reuters View image in fullscreen Police have declared a critical incident in Belfast after protests broke out. Photograph: Isabel Infantes/Reuters ‘There’s wee girls inside’: panic as masked men storm house in Belfast Protests across the city turned violent on Tuesday night – with some police officers appearing to conclude it wasn’t safe to intervene On a residential street draped in loyalist flags near Belfast’s Shankill Road, the masked men approached a house with a boarded-up window and a security camera stationed outside. As a woman from an ethnic minority background looked down from an upstairs window, some of the men rushed the front door and broke it down. With the air thick with smoke from fireworks, they attacked the downstairs windows with bricks. As they stormed the property, some claimed to be “liberating” it. Graffiti nearby demanded “local homes for local people”. A woman in the crowd said to her friend: “There’s wee girls inside.” Nearby, a car was set on fire. As the chaos unfolded, a man in a skull face mask told people to put their phones away. Helicopters circled overhead, and two police officers looked on from their car as smoke billowed towards the sky – but appeared to conclude that it was not safe to intervene. View image in fullscreen The violent scenes played out after a Sudanese asylum seeker was charged with attempted murder in relation to a knife attack. Photograph: Hannah Al-Othman/The Guardian By the time reinforcements arrived in four police vans, most of the hundreds-strong crowd had melted away, leaving only a few stragglers in their wake. The violent scenes played out after a Sudanese asylum seeker was charged with attempted murder in relation to a knife attack filmed in a graphic video widely shared on social media on Tuesday. Footage was posted by Tommy Robinson and other far-right figures, prompting demands for protests in response. X owner Elon Musk shared a post from Robinson (whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) announcing locations of protests, and another from the far-right Restore Britain party that read: “Do not make peace with evil. Destroy it.” The Shankill Road crowd’s hostility to being filmed was in sharp contrast to the unrest that broke out in Southport in 2024, where many members of the crowd recorded videos of events as they unfolded. Here, a teenager was dragged out of the crowd, apparently because he had been using his phone. “You’re hurting me,” he shouted. “I can’t breathe.” There were also protests in other parts of the UK – including in Southampton, where riots broke out last week following the sentencing of a man for the murder of 18-year-old Henry Nowak. On Tuesday night, dozens of police officers were deployed to block protesters as they sought to move along Portswood Road. When they were stopped, the group began chanting “I can’t breathe”. That is what Nowak, a student from S