Dublin man ordered members of anti-immigration WhatsApp group to carry out violent attack 'that made news';
Hours after a lone knife-wielding man plunged his weapon into three schoolchildren on the streets of Dublin, a call to arms has been sounded.
A small but vocal minority took to social media to spark the worst night in history. riots that the Irish capital has witnessed for decades.
Their fury was fueled by unsubstantiated reports on the Internet that the man who attacked the children was from Algeria.
The terrifying target of the riots for one so-called “patriot”: “kill all foreigners.”
“Be in the city at seven o’clock. Everyone dresses up in balaclavas, drys off with towels, and any damn idiot, foreigner, whoever, just kill them. Just kill them. Let's put this on the damn news,” the Dublin man said in a voice message to an anti-immigration WhatsApp group called “Enough is enough.”
Over the next few hours on Thursday evening, chaos unfolded.
Along one of Dublin's most famous streets, O'Connell Street, police were attacked, cars were set on fire and shops were looted.
In one video clip, a group of young men dressed in balaclavas and branded tracksuits entered to McDonald's and came out a few seconds later, claiming to have stolen one of the restaurant's charity boxes, used to raise money for a children's hospital in the city.
Ireland's oldest department store, Arnotts on Henry Street, was also attacked when the gang broke in and searched its shelves shortly after it closed.
Shoplifters laughed and screamed as they carried mannequins out of the 180-year-old establishment.
The store's CEO said Friday that the incident resulted in his employees, some of whom were reportedly still in the store at the time , “shocked.”
The FootLocker store on O'Connell Street was looted yesterday and remained closed after some of its merchandise was stolen and its front windows were broken.
Violent anti-immigration rioters quickly turned their wrath on police, one of whom was seriously injured.
A lone unarmed police officer was captured on video as a group of youths surrounded and grabbed him on the O'Connell Bridge.
At one point, the young man set fire to a cardboard box and threw it at an empty parked police car as spectators cheered and the car burst into flames. Rioters fired flares and fireworks at police officers, wounding several of them, one seriously.
As night fell, images reminiscent of a war zone emerged: a tram and a double-decker were set on fire in the city center bus. city center.
The bus driver, who is originally from Mauritius but has lived in the country for 15 years, told Irish media that rioters stopped the bus at a traffic light and began banging on the windshield, telling him: “Get off the bus or we will kill you.”
< p>The riots turned out to be well planned. Protesters told each other to disperse to make it harder for police to stop the unrest.
“They can't control us all. Let’s split up into small groups and do what we have to do,” said a man from the WhatsApp group.
“Let's show the damn media that we are not dummies and that no more foreigners are allowed into this disgusting country. Enough means enough. This is the straw that broke the camel's back. You're touching our damn children, and here are the consequences.»
X number of people have been called upon to flood Dublin city center to express their fury at the attack on schoolchildren.
“Take the train, take the bus, but most importantly get to Dublin and support your fellow Irish,” one person wrote.
Given the scale of the violence, the Rotunda Maternity Hospital on Parnell street, near the scene of Thursday's attack, was forced to ban patients from traveling there «unnecessarily.»
The fury of protesters began even before police revealed the attacker's motives or his ethnicity. They clashed with the police, shouting “get them out, go to hell!”, apparently referring to migrants.
The hashtag #enoughisenough was trending on social media, with one man writing: “I think there was a lot of diversity and cultural enrichment in Ireland that led to the attempted murder of three young girls in Dublin city centre.”
The National Party, a tiny far-right anti-immigration party that has no MPs in Parliament, published a message on X telling men to “grow up” to “make Ireland safe for women and children.” /p>
The message, viewed more than 22,000 times, said: “Are you happy to sit and watch Irish children get stabbed to death, or will you pull yourself together and fight back?”
Violence unfolds on the streets of the city in response to a knife attack in which a man attacked three young children with a knife as they left school in Dublin city center in the early hours.
One witness described the scene as “absolute bedlam.”
Another said: “The children were walking. Suddenly one of them fell to the ground, then another fell to the ground, then another fell to the ground. Then this guy ran past.”
Police initially said the attack did not have any political or terrorist motive, but at a later briefing the police commissioner said this could not be ruled out.
There is an assumption that the man could have had a psychotic attack. He is not believed to have any connection to the school.
Police Commissioner Drew Harris called the riots «disgraceful» and called the protesters «a completely crazed faction driven by far-right ideology.»
“We have seen a group of people who literally take a thimble full of facts and take a bath of hateful assumptions, and then behave violently and are destructive to our society,” he added.
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