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14-06-2026
BELFAST, NORTH IRELAND: When violence broke out in east Belfast near Zeinab’s home, as a mother of three from Sudan, she felt terrified.
Anti-immigrant rioters have carried out a wave of racist attacks in the Northern Irish capital after a knife attack on Wednesday.
The alleged assailant, a 30-year-old Sudanese national who entered Northern Ireland through Ireland, has been charged with attempted murder. The victim, 44-year-old Stephen Ogilvie, remains in hospital with life-changing injuries to his face and back, having reportedly lost an eye.
“We strongly condemn and reject what happened,” said Zeinab, who requested to withhold her surname. “Unfortunately, it turned out that (the suspect) is of Sudanese nationality but this is the opposite of what is known about our Sudanese people. They are kind people, known for their generosity, their morals and the way they treat others.”
As agitators burned homes and businesses they believed to be owned by ethnic minorities, Zeinab asked an NGO, the Anaka Women’s Collective, to evacuate her family. Like other people of color, she was welcomed by an Irish family and is now taking shelter outside Belfast.
“May God reward them with all goodness? We cannot describe what they have done for us,” she said. “We feel that not everyone here is unaccepting of foreigners. There is goodness, there are people who love us, people who shared their homes with us, shared our worries, shared our moments of weakness, and took us in.”
On Tuesday evening, an eerie silence took hold of the city as panicked local traders hurriedly pulled up their shutters, locking up early after threats issued on social media earlier that day.
A list created by AI, shared by prominent figures such as Tommy Robinson and Elon Musk, warned “All Bunnesses” shut up shop by 5.30pm. It included names of streets in the Northern Irish capital. A second list showed some 70 locations in the United Kingdom, also shared about the same time.
“The whole of the United Kingdom is hitting the streets tonight at 7pm following yet another invader attack on our people,” far-right agitator Robinson said.
Hundreds heeded the call.
Young boys, some of whom looked no older than 13, marched determinedly in the direction of east Belfast’s Lower Newtownards Road.
Within an hour, several loud bangs were heard as a bus and other vehicles were set alight, sending plumes of smoke into the drizzly June evening. Some perpetrators were understood to have been as young as 10.
On the street, the words “F*** Islam” were graffitied on the shutters of a halal butcher shop. Anti-Islam sentiment appears to be a “more prominent feature” in these riots, Amnesty International’s Northern Ireland Director Patrick Corrigan told media, compared with other episodes of unrest.
As video footage showed, crowds would go on to smash windows, kick down doors and attempt to intimidate or burn out residents from nearby houses where they believed migrants were living. A large group of adults watched as the young rioters kicked up mayhem, terrorizing Belfast’s relatively small but growing ethnic minority communities and claiming the night and this part of town as theirs.
Only 3.4 percent of Northern Ireland’s population, just over 65,000 people, were found to be from an ethnic minority background in the 2022 census. In a country of 1.9 million, just 2,379 are seeking asylum but as Corrigan has noted, this is the “third consecutive summer in which Northern Ireland has experienced organized racist violence, with each outbreak more serious than the last”. (Int’l News Desk)
