Special Report: Belfast riots - how Elon Musk is stoking a new wave of British violence
6/10/202655 min
Belfast was ablaze last night, 24 hours after the attempted murder of Stephen Ogilvie. Houses, cars and buses were set on fire during riots across the city. It has since been announced that Ogilvie has lost an eye in the attack and 30-year-old Hadi Alodid has been charged with his attempted murder.
The British government are laying at least some of the blame at the door of X owner Elon Musk, accusing him of whipping up tensions online ahead of the disorder.
Lewis is on the ground in Belfast with Andy Hughes from The Crime Agents with a special report on the events that unfolded last night.
Later, Jon and Emily speak with journalist and broadcaster Mehdi Hasan, who discusses how Musk and the far right have whipped up rioters and encouraged violence on the streets of Northern Ireland.
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsLewis Goodall· Host0:01
[upbeat music] This is a Global Player original podcast.
Andy Hughes· Guest0:05
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.
Lewis Goodall· Host0:16
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 flavor. 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.
Richard Tice· Soundbite1:21
[upbeat music] The News Agents.