Belfast Burns: Third Night of Anti-Migrant Riots
After a knife attack that blinded a man, anti-immigrant riots have raged for a third straight night in Belfast, with family homes torched and police deploying water cannon.
- For a third straight night, on June 9, 10 and 11, anti-immigrant riots erupted across Belfast following a knife attack that left a man blind in his left eye.
- Masked men set fire to several homes occupied by immigrants, along with a bus, a shop and numerous vehicles; firefighters answered 62 calls between 7 p.m. and midnight.
- More than two dozen people were left homeless, while police deployed water cannon and an extra 200 officers.
- Far-right figures and Elon Musk are amplifying footage of the attack, and Northern Ireland recorded 2,048 racist incidents in the past year.
For a country like Serbia, which has long balanced its European ambitions against the pressures of its own migration route, the images coming out of Belfast are anything but distant. They show how quickly a single crime can ignite a political fire that tests the state, the police and the social contract itself. For the third night running, from June 9 to 11, northern Belfast has burned in anti-immigrant rioting, and the pictures of torched homes are circulating across Europe faster than the authorities can put out the flames.
The trigger was a knife attack in north Belfast, in which Hadi Alodid, 30, a Sudanese national, has been charged with attempted murder after stabbing Stephen Ogilvie, a man in his forties, leaving him with serious injuries and blind in his left eye. Alodid entered Northern Ireland in 2023 on an asylum permit, a detail that was instantly turned into ammunition against migration policy. What began as a reaction to one crime has hardened into organised violence aimed at an entire community.
What is actually happening in Belfast?
Over the nights of June 9, 10 and 11, groups of masked men set fire to homes housing immigrants, as well as a bus, a shop and a large number of vehicles. Between 7 p.m. and midnight alone, fire crews responded to 62 incidents, and more than two dozen people were left without a home. Families were pulled from burning houses and moved into police stations, while rioters prised out bricks, smashed pavements with sledgehammers and pelted officers with petrol bombs.
The Police Service of Northern Ireland deployed water cannon and brought in an extra 200 officers, yet the violence spread faster than the available numbers could contain. The sight of family homes set ablaze makes clear that the targets were not abstract political opponents but specific people inside their own houses. Northern Ireland’s First Minister, Michelle O’Neill, said that “groups of masked men setting fire to families in their homes are nothing but despicable cowardice,” while British Prime Minister Keir Starmer called the scenes “shocking and utterly unacceptable.”
The figures suggest this is no isolated flare-up. Northern Ireland logged 2,048 racist incidents over the past twelve months, among the highest levels since records began in 2004. The stabbing was the spark, but the kindling had been piling up for years.
How is it spreading, and who is fanning the flames?
The violence has not stayed local. The far-right activist Tommy Robinson is circulating footage of the attack and calling for protests, while Elon Musk, owner of the platform X, has shared his posts with a vast audience. A single crime in north Belfast is, through the algorithm, being converted into global political content that further mobilises rioters on the ground.
For Brussels and London, this is a double bind: a security one, since water cannon and reinforcements treat the symptoms but not the cause, and a political one, as the migration debate is increasingly waged through burning houses rather than through institutions. Northern Ireland, with its fraught history of division, is especially vulnerable to this kind of mobilisation, and every new night of rioting makes a return to normality harder.
The open question reaches beyond Belfast: how ready are European societies, the Serbian one included, to separate an individual crime from collective guilt before the next spark sets the next street alight?
