Northern Ireland shaken but defiant after mobs set 'foreign' homes ablaze

Protesters pledge unity and police vow to hunt offenders after nights of violence stoked by alleged attack on girl

- John Simpson & Amanda Ferguson Belfast

Houses flying union flags or displaying signs that read “locals live here” were spared.

Others went up in flames. Masked men walked the streets of Ballymena, County Antrim, last week seeking out foreigners, smashing windows and burning homes to the ground.

By Friday the violence had spread to other towns, with 17 arrests and more than 60 police wounded by petrol bombs, fireworks and rocks. Officers came from Scotland to bolster numbers.

The red hand of Ulster and images of William of Orange are familiar icons in these parts, but the loyalist insignia became tokens of safety last week, hung from windows and pinned to doors to deter racist mobs targeting migrants for the alleged crimes of two 14-year-old boys.

Last Monday, two boys appeared by videolink at Coleraine Magistrates' Court, accused of the attempted rape of a teenage girl in Ballymena. Dressed in grey tracksuits, they sat beside each other at a juvenile detention centre and spoke through a Romanian interpreter. That evening, thousands gathered in Ballymena in an initially peaceful show of support for the complainant.

When police stopped the crowd from entering Clonavon Terrace, where the girl alleges that she was sexually assaulted, masked men began making roadblocks and stockpiling bricks and rocks. Five nights of arson and rioting followed.

Inside one of the terraced houses, a visibly shaken Filipino man put his hand to his heart. "Right now I can't explain how fearful I am. We're just afraid because we might get in trouble if we don't put anything on our house," he told Channel 4 News last Thursday.

"We asked the landlord if they can provide us some flags or anything. They just gave us that," he said, gesturing to a loyalist flag in the window.