Police patrolled the violence-scarred streets of this English town Sunday after a night of race riots involving whites and Asians that was likely to make crime an issue in general elections on June 7.
More than 20 people were hurt and 17 arrested as police fought running battles with up to 500 Asian youths, mainly of Bangladeshi descent, through Saturday night. The youths hurled bricks and petrol bombs at riot police.
A police spokeswoman said fighting may have been sparked by a gang of white youths who threw bricks at a house belonging to an Asian family earlier Saturday. The youths were arrested.
She also said there had been stone-throwing earlier in the town between right-wing white groups and Asian youths, many of whom were born in Britain after their families moved to Britain from the Indian sub-continent decades ago.
The riot, which reached its height shortly after midnight in this northern English town of Oldham, near Manchester, turned the area into a near-war zone.
Cars were set on fire, at least five pubs firebombed and a number of police cars were badly damaged.
"There were fires burning in the streets, there was rubble all over the road and the air's full of smoke," a police spokeswoman told Reuters after hundreds of riot police from around Greater Manchester were drafted in to quell the fighting.
"They threw quite a lot of petrol bombs," Manchester police Superintendent Eric Hewitt told reporters. "I am very angry. We could have had someone killed."
Paul Barrow, landlord of the Live and Let Live Pub, told Reuters the riots came as a complete surprise.
"I am shell-shocked. This is total devastation," he said of the burned curtains and smashed windows of his pub.
Police and residents said that racial tensions had been mounting for some time.
"We have seen tensions building here for many months, but not on the scale we saw last night. No one can provide an explanation for this at the moment. We will be looking to rebuild confidence in the community," Hewitt said -- OLDHAM, England (Reuters)
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