By Conor Humphries
BALLYMENA, Northern Ireland (Reuters) -Public disorder broke out in different parts of Northern Ireland for the third successive night on Wednesday, as rioters attacked police with petrol bombs in the main flashpoint of Ballymena and a fire was started at a leisure centre in the town of Larne.
Hundreds of masked rioters injured police and set homes and cars on fire in the town of Ballymena, 45 kilometres (28 miles) from Belfast, during the previous two nights in what police condemned as “racist thuggery.”
Riot police and armoured vans blocked roads in Ballymena on Wednesday evening as a crowd of hundreds watched on. About two dozen masked youths threw some rocks, fireworks and petrol bombs at police, a Reuters witness said.
Police warned the crowd to disperse immediately and deployed water cannon against them for the second successive night.
Riot police were also in Larne where masked youths smashed the leisure centre’s windows before starting fires in the lobby, BBC footage showed.
Swimming classes were taking place when bricks were thrown through the windows and staff had to barricade themselves in before running out the back door, a local Alliance Party lawmaker, Danny Donnelly, told the BBC.
“There is absolutely no excuse for what has taken place in Larne and it must be condemned,” Northern Ireland’s Communities Minister Gordon Lyons, a Democratic Unionist Party representative for the area, told Cool FM radio.
Police said youths were setting fires at a roundabout in the town of Newtownabbey, a flashpoint for sectarian violence that sporadically flares up in the British-run region 27 years after a peace deal largely ended three decades of bloodshed.
Debris was also set alight at a barricade in Coleraine, the Belfast Telegraph reported.
The violence initially erupted after two 14-year-old boys were arrested and appeared in court on Monday, accused of a serious sexual assault on a teenage girl in Ballymena.
The charges were read via a Romanian interpreter to the boys, whose lawyer told the court that they denied the charge, the BBC reported. Police are investigating the damaging of properties in Ballymena, which has a relatively large migrant population, as racially-motivated hate crimes.
Two Filipino families told Reuters they fled their home in the town on Tuesday night after fearing for their safety when their car was set on fire outside the house.
The British and Irish governments as well as local politicians have condemned the violence.
(Rreporting by Conor Humphries and Amanda Ferguson; Writing by Padraic Halpin; Editing by Daniel Wallis)
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