Violent anti-immigration protests erupted in parts of Belfast on Tuesday evening with some masked demonstrators setting fire to a bus, cars and trash cans, and going door to door looking for immigrants. Far-right figures had called on social media for mass protests after a brutal stabbing attack the previous night in Northern Ireland’s capital.
A graphic video of the incident, showing a man slashing another man in the head and neck with a knife, spread quickly online earlier in the day. The Police Service of Northern Ireland detained and charged a Sudanese man in his 30s with attempted murder, possession of a knife in a public place and making threats to kill.
The accused man entered Northern Ireland, a semi-autonomous region of the United Kingdom, after applying for asylum, and in 2023 he was granted a five-year U.K. visa. He is scheduled to appear in court on Wednesday to face the charges.
The victim of the attack was taken to the hospital with serious injuries to his eyes, face and back, police said.
Despite calls for calm from the police and politicians from all major parties, dozens of fully masked protesters gathered in several places Tuesday evening and caused violent unrest, with one local lawmaker from Belfast calling it “a race-based pogrom.”
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Claire Hanna, a member of the British parliament from Belfast with the Social Democratic & Labour Party, told BBC’s “Newsnight” program that people were “understandably revulsed and shocked” by the stabbing, but she condemned “negative actors online and politicians locally who don’t really care what communities in north Belfast have been through” for fomenting the violence.
“What you’re seeing is a race-based pogrom,” she said, naming U.S. tech magnate Elon Musk, President Trump’s ideological ally and Reform UK party leader Nigel Farage, and British far-right figure Tommy Robinson as some of the prominent figures who spread the stabbing video and called for mass protests.
Numerous social media accounts had urged people to take to the streets and “protest against mass immigration into their communities.”
Northern Ireland First Minister Michelle O’Neill called the scenes of unrest “outright thuggery.”
“Groups of masked men burning families out of their homes is nothing less than disgusting cowardice,” O’Neill said in a statement shared on social media.
Video aired by BBC News showed multiple people fleeing their homes in northern Belfast after the buildings were set on fire, and the Northern Ireland Fire & Rescue service said it had responded to 62 incidents between 7pm and midnight. Some videos showed first responders helping to usher people from their homes after fires were lit in neighborhoods with large immigrant populations.
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John Finucane, a lawmaker in Northern Ireland, called the scenes “shameful & disgraceful.” In a social media post, Finucane said he shared the revulsion of the attack that prompted the protest but added: “No one has the right to spread fear, terrorize innocent families or unleash lawless disorder on our streets.”
The video of the stabbing attack, which has been verified by CBS News Confirmed, shows a man being violently assaulted and stabbed multiple times around the head and neck. It has been widely described online as an attempted beheading. Police have said there’s no indication it was terror-related, but an investigation is ongoing to determine the motive.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer called the attack “horrific” and “sickening.”
“I have absolutely no tolerance for abhorrent scenes of violence like this on our streets,” he said on X. “My thoughts are first and foremost with the victim, and I thank the first responders, including members of the public who intervened.”
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While many of the protesters CBS News encountered in Belfast on Tuesday evening were hostile to journalists, two men, who wished to be identified only as Chris and John, said they were shocked by the stabbing video and felt compelled to come out and show solidarity with the victim, but they rejected the violence and destruction on the streets.
Chris said he lives outside Belfast but works and attends church in the city. He and John are from different sides of Northern Ireland’s two communities — broadly, nationalists from largely Catholic families who want a united Ireland, and unionists, who tend to be Protestant and want the province to remain part of the U.K. — which have a history of animosity and decades of violence. The two men said they went to the area to pray together after the stabbing.
“The worrying thing is that people are kind of surprised, but not surprised” by the attack, Chris told CBS News. “Look at the incident that happened in Southampton, and that’s just one of many,” he said, referring to the murder of Henry Nowak in southern Englandwhich sparked anti-immigration protests and clashes with police earlier this month.
The way police responded to that case was seized on by far-right activists and political figures as an example of what some called “two-tier” policing — with immigrants allegedly getting better treatment than British residents. The police force involved in the incident strongly rejected the accusation.
Vice President JD Vance was among the prominent figures to criticize the handling of the Nowak case, claiming in a social media post that the white teenager would still be alive, “if the last few generations of European elites had stood their ground against the politics of self-hatred and the mass invasion of migrants, many of whom despise the west and the people who love it.”
Nowak was stabbed to death by Vickrum Digwa, a British-born Sikh who claimed to police that he was subjected to a racist assault by Nowak. A court found that claim was false. When officers arrived on the scene, they treated Nowak as a suspect as he lay wounded, dismissing his pleas for help and casting doubt as he said he had ben stabbed, before eventually seeing his injury and attempting to resuscitate him.
Digwa was sentenced last week to life in prison, with a minimum term in prison of 21 years.