Riots Rage On In London For Third Straight Day

Swaths of London became scenes of lawless looting and raging fires Monday as the wave of civil unrest that has gripped this sprawling capital sharply escalated, including fresh riots close to the athletes’ village and shiny new stadiums built for the 2012 Olympic Games.

The images of violence — with hundreds of youths looting shops, setting businesses ablaze and clashing with police in at least a half-dozen neighborhoods – deeply shocked Londoners, dealing this legendary city an enormously damaging blow less than a year before the start of the Olympics.

Rioters attacked double decker buses and set alight a column of fire that engulfed a street side in south London. Most of a block in the southern neighborhood of Croydon raged in flames.

Prime Minister David Cameron cut short a vacation trip to Tuscany, urgently returning to London Monday night to chair an emergency cabinet meeting to handle the mounting crisis. The embattled Metropolitan Police called in reinforcements from police forces outside London to help cope.

“Nobody should go out on the streets unless they have business to do so,” Simon Hughes, a national lawmaker from an inner London neighborhood, told reporters.

The escalating unrest – spreading in part via mobile BlackBerry texts, Twitter and other social networking sites — was taking root in the powder keg of poorer neighborhoods largely away from the iconic central heart of London popular with American vacationers. Reports indicated some youths had also begun rioting in one neighborhood in Birmingham, Britain’s second largest city.

The violence first erupted Saturday night in Tottenham, a gritty north London neighborhood, following the fatal shooting of a black resident by police investigating gun crimes. Those riots triggered a disturbing ripple effect among disenfranchised youths in other parts of the city on Sunday that spread in size and intensity on Monday.

Some, including the former London mayor Ken Livingstone, suggested the Tottenham riot had triggered pent up resentment over the weak economy, high unemployment and historically deep budget cuts that are decreasing government funding for poor communities and grass roots charities. He blamed a sense that young Britons are facing “the bleakest future.”

“This is the first generation since the great depression that have doubts about the their future,” he told the BBC.

But others – including Britain’s coalition government — denounced the riots as an extraordinary spree of opportunistic criminality following the Tottenham riots late Saturday night. Unlike the protests last December that included vandalism by anarchists of central London businesses, those participating in riots over the past 48 hours showed no signs of trying to make a political statement.

It left parts of the city gripped by fear, with residents and shopkeepers barring their doors or evacuating besieged neighborhoods. In Hackney, a neighborhood not far from the new Olympic park that has become a showcase of a city trying to turn the games into an opportunity for urban redevelopment, riots erupted in the late afternoon. A line of police with plastic shields cordoned off a commercial artery that had effectively been taken over by masked looters who broke shop windows and seemed to steal indiscriminately.

“The crimes are being committed and the police are just standing by,” said Andrew Faris, director of Rhythms of Life International, a homeless shelter near the center of the Hackney riots. “People are scared. There are angry young people doing whatever they want. How can this be happening next door to the Olympic site?”

SMH. This doesn’t look like it’s anywhere near ready to subside. Click through for more photos of the unrest and damage caused so far.

Source/Add’l Photos: Daily Mail