Special Report: Belfast riots - how Elon Musk is stoking a new wave of British violence
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is a Global Player original podcast. There's a fire in the middle of the road. They've torched one of the cars here. It looks as though they're setting fire to a lot more wheelie bins. There's a real stench of menace in the air here.
You can still smell the burning ember. the smell of gasoline in the street here in East Belfast. Because last night, violence returned to the streets of Belfast, but not the sort of violence that we've seen happen all too often before, a fight between loyalism and nationalism, but actually something that we are seeing again and again across British streets and British cities, albeit infused with a distinctly Northern Irish flavour. After an attempted attack, where the assailant we now know was an asylum seeker, we saw people take to the streets, going house by house in this city in what one politician has described to us as an attempted pogrom against ethnic minorities. How did this come to happen?
And how can it be that political figures, in some cases thousands of miles away, have added fuel to that fire? Welcome to The News Agents. The News Agents. It's Lewis in Belfast. A little bit later on in the show, John and Emily will be talking to Mehdi Hassan, partly about what's been happening here in the really, really chilling story in Belfast, but also about American politics and much else besides as well. But we have got to start with events. here in East Belfast. But it's not just here, because violence, as I was saying at the top, has broken out across the city. Homes, vehicles set on fire following that knife attack in the north of the city on Monday night. If you haven't been following this story until you've just been waking up this morning and hearing about the violence for the first time, you may well have seen the really, really chilling, disturbing video of the knife attack.
If you haven't seen it, I wouldn't recommend you go and seek it out because it is really, really disturbing. We now know that the man who was attacked there is in hospital, serious wounds after the attack. It looks like he's lost the sight in his left eye. A 30-year-old man, Hadi Al Udeid, who is Sudanese, was arrested at the scene and appeared in court on Wednesday.
What events led to the recent riots in Belfast?
He's been remanded in custody. And we know as well that the Home Office have said that he was given leave to remain in the UK until 2028. He entered the UK via Dublin in 2023 and was granted refugee status that same year. So it is another one of these cases, and there have been some, another one of those cases where someone who has entered the country, either legally or illegally, has been found to have committed a heinous crime which has Inevitably, perhaps not inevitably, but which has certainly generated a huge political response. And in this case, violence with over 250 incidents last night. the police having to respond to. I'm here with Andy Hughes, who is, of course, presenter from the Crime Agents and LBC Crime Correspondent.
And I flew in today, Andy, but you came in last night to see it at the sharpest end. And we should say we're standing now on the road which has been at the centre of so much of this stuff. And for people who aren't watching but are listening, It is a truly, truly grim sight because you can see some of the buildings last night where some of these people, young men generally, balaclavas were going along, literally trying to firebomb or to bomb people out of their homes. And you can see one, two, three cars literally completely burnt out. Andy, what was it like last night?
Well, just to set the scene, we flew in at about 8pm last night, and as we flew in, we saw huge plumes of smoke dotted around all of Belfast. And when we landed, we thought we'd go for the one with the biggest cloud. And that was here. And on that main road over there, that's where those visceral images of the bus being set alight were from. So we came here, and it was really kicking off on that main road, but there was not a police officer in sight, which stunned me. Really? Yeah. I was expecting huge numbers of riot police, but they just weren't there.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:02–2:27
2
What events led to the recent riots in Belfast?
2:27–5:41
3
How has Elon Musk's influence been linked to the violence?
5:41–8:01
4
What role do political figures play in escalating tensions?
8:01–12:00
5
What were the immediate consequences of the riots in Belfast?
12:00–15:06
6
How did the community respond to the violence?
15:06–19:16
7
What is the historical context of violence in Northern Ireland?
19:16–24:27
8
How is social media impacting public perception of the riots?
24:27–54:35
Speakers
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