The horrific attempted murder of a man in Belfast has sparked international outrage from major figures.
Harrowing footage captured at around 10.30pm on Monday evening appeared to show a man, described by police as a 30-year-old asylum seeker who had been granted indefinite leave to remain in Northern Ireland, violently stabbing another man in the street.
The video shows a man – named today as Hadi Alodid – standing astride a bloodied victim, holding a knife to his throat and his fist in the air.
Police said a kitchen knife was recovered from the scene.
The man, named by residents as Stephen Ogilvie, suffered severe knife wounds to his face, neck and back.
In the wake of Monday night’s attack and violent riots across the city on Tuesday, many across Europe and the US reacted with rage.
Santiago Abascal, the leader of hard-right Spanish party Vox, said on social media: ‘Europe is not condemned to passively coexist with those who stab, slit throats and rape in broad daylight every day.
‘There is another path. There is another future. Total intolerance towards this barbarity, and immediate deportations.’
A young man smiles at the camera in front of a burning barricade on Duncairn Gardens
Protesters attack a police vehicle on Sandy Row in Belfast
A Glider bus on the Newtownards Road in east Belfast was one of the first targets to be set alight
He added: ‘That path will not be taken by the same leaders who have encouraged this invasion and who are more concerned with managing the public image of the executioners than protecting the security of their own citizens.’
Over in the Netherlands, Geert Wilders, who heads up the right-wing Party for Freedom (PVV), shared video of the horrific incident with the caption: ‘Please listen now. Open border policy is criminal. It is killing us.’
Their anger was matched by US-based Elon Musk, CEO of social media platform X, who wrote in response to calls to protest across the UK following the attack: ‘Only by protesting REPEATEDLY and LOUDLY will there be any change!!’
Ian Mendoza, executive director of the Henry Jackson Society, told Fox News that the Belfast attack laid bare what he described as failures in Britain’s immigration system.
‘Britain’s broken border and migration system has been put into stark relief once more with this tragic — and entirely avoidable — case,’ Mendoza said.
‘This man should never ever have been in the UK, let alone been granted leave to remain. The Irish border is the soft underbelly for a process the British public has long since lost confidence in, as well as in those administering it politically.
‘Nothing short of a revolution in who we allow into the UK and how will satisfy a people fed up with false promises about immigration change.’
Tuesday night saw violent protests break out in Belfast as hundreds of masked protesters torched homes and vehicles following the arrest of the alleged Sudanese attacker.
Houses, cars, a bus and a supermarket were set alight as parts of the city descended into chaos, with some suggestions that non-white residents were deliberately targeted by some of the fires.
Northern Ireland’s First Minister, Michelle O’Neill, condemned the ‘outright thuggery’, saying that ‘groups of masked men burning families out of their homes is nothing less than disgusting cowardice’.
Protesters were said to be targeting HMOs (Houses in Multiple Occupation), where multiple people live in a shared property – and which some claim are being used to house migrants at the taxpayers’ expense.
Stephen Ogilvie (pictured) was severely injured in the attack
Lendrick Street in east Belfast was engulfed in flames, with multiple cars and at least one house ablaze
Burnt-out cars and houses pictured this morning on Lendrick Street
The suspect was last night charged with attempted murder and will appear in court today.
But behind the unquestionably damnable violence were grave new questions over a gaping ‘backdoor to Britain’. The Sudanese suspect legally crossed from the Republic of Ireland to Northern Ireland three years ago under a long-standing arrangement which means no passport checks are conducted.
He took a bus from Dublin to Belfast and immediately claimed asylum, the authorities revealed under pressure for answers yesterday. A few months later, the Home Office granted him a five-year visa as a refugee.
There are growing calls for a review of border security measures deployed under the Common Travel Area (CTA), which allows freedom of movement between Ireland and the UK.
Ogilvie, in his 40s, last night remained in a serious condition in hospital. It is understood he lived in the same block of social housing as the suspect.
Yesterday evening, long before it got dark, protesters gathered on the streets across Belfast following social media calls, ignoring police pleas for calm.
Just before 8pm, masked men dressed in black pushed burning bins up against a bus, setting it ablaze and sending thick smoke into the sky. Houses and cars were also later set alight alongside a Middle Eastern supermarket.
Footage of the chaos shows infants being carried out of neighbouring houses as flames engulf the properties.
Pastor Jack McKee, at one such scene on Crumlin Road, in the city’s north, told BBC News that residents were being hounded from their homes ‘because they’re black’.
In east Belfast, Lendrick Road was swallowed up by flames. Jamie Corry, who has lived there for 13 years, watched in horror as his house was ‘completely’ destroyed by thugs, alongside ‘sentimental’ items belonging to his late father.
‘I came out that door and I told them: ”This is my property, this is my property here,” and then they started to light the red car up,’ he said.
‘So once I saw the flames starting to get bigger and bigger, I moved away from my property, I moved down the street there and watched it all. The next minute the cars started to explode, the doors started smoking, the windows started melting, and the next thing the house was going to go up on fire.’
In the Lower Newtownards Road area, around 100 masked men made their way down the street kicking in doors and smashing windows, saying they were ‘getting the foreigners out’, the BBC reported.
It was also reported that groups of locals had set up checkpoints and were checking passing cars for foreign nationals.
The dramatic scenes began unfolding at around 8pm, soon after crowds started gathering, when protesters pushed a flaming bin into a Glider bus on the Newtownards Road, burning it to a cinder.
Police vehicles also came under attack from bricks and vandals climbing on top of them, and at least one was set on fire.
Around 20 miles outside Belfast, in County Antrim, a Turkish barber shop was attacked, with its front door and windows smashed in.
The Northern Ireland Fire and Rescue Service said it attended 62 incidents, mainly in the Greater Belfast area.
Anti-immigrant protests also took place in several other cities around the UK on Tuesday night, including London, Glasgow, and Southampton.
The burnt-out shell of the Glider bus this morning
Hundreds of masked men defied government ministers’ calls for calm to take to the streets
Assistant Chief Constable Ryan Henderson, of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), sought to quell the ‘sporadic pockets of disorder’ soon after the potential for serious disorder became clear.
He urged ‘everyone to remain calm, act responsibly, and avoid any activity that could place themselves or others at risk’, and said officers were ‘on the ground, working alongside partner agencies, responding to incidents as they arise’.
The PSNI also issued a Police Dispersal Order and warned protesters that force may be used to protect public safety.
The disorder was later met with strong words from Ms O’Neill, who said: ‘This has nothing to do with community. This is outright thuggery.
‘The attack in north Belfast was heinous and wrong. But there are dangerous attempts to exploit that, to target and attack innocent people who are simply trying to live, work and raise their families here.’
She added that racism, intimidation and violence were wrong wherever it occurred.
‘There can be no excuse and no justification for these attacks tonight. No one wants to see this on our streets and I again appeal for calm,’ she said.
Deputy First Minister Emma Little-Pengelly reiterated that ‘violence does not advance any cause, it damages it’, adding: ‘Destroying things within your own community benefits no one.’
A car that was burnt by rioters on Lendrick Street in the east of the city
A house burns in east Belfast – one of several set on fire during the course of the evening
Northern Ireland Justice Minister Naomi Long said ‘bad-faith’ actors stoking racial tensions on social media should ‘step away from their keyboards’, adding: ‘If you weren’t interested in Northern Ireland on Sunday, you don’t need to show interest in Northern Ireland today.’
Speaking on BBC Breakfast today, Ms Long said: ‘Let us get on with the job of trying to bring calm to our streets, of trying to rebuild our community, of reassuring both people who live in North Belfast and across Belfast.’
She added: ‘We recognise in Northern Ireland that immigration is a vexed issue, and there is a conversation that we can have rationally and logically about that, but there are others who weaponize it to stir up racial tensions, to stir up division in communities.’
Meanwhile, Northern Ireland’s former first minister Arlene Foster said the ‘genuine fears in working class’ communities about immigration risks had been ‘overshadowed’ by the riots.
She said local services were already struggling and immigration could put them ‘even more under pressure’.
However, she said their concerns had been ‘taken off the agenda’ after the ‘depressing’ scenes last night. Foster added that politicians had been wrong to ‘sneer’ at people’s fears of ‘alien cultures’, saying: ‘There is no attempt to try and deal with the difference that they bring.’
She urged people to end the disruption, saying: ‘Please, please do not get involved in violence on our streets.’
The horrific street stabbing on Monday night prompted calls for a review of border security measures deployed under the so-called Common Travel Area, or CTA, which encompasses the UK, Northern Ireland and the Republic.
Officers have said they did not believe the attack was related to terrorism.
