Racists attack woman in Belfast

2004-01-08 16:28

Belfast - A heavily pregnant Pakistani woman and her brother-in-law were targets in the latest racially motivated attack to hit a Protestant district of Northern Ireland's capital, police said on Thursday.

Police suspect a Protestant gang to be responsible for hurling a 2m plank through the front window of the pair's house in the Donegall Road area of Belfast, home to armed Protestant groups, late on Wednesday.

Broken glass showered the living room where the owners had been eating 20 minutes earlier, leaving the occupants badly shocked, though without cuts.

"Police believe that the attack on the house was racially motivated," a spokesperson for the Police Service of Northern Ireland said, adding that the pregnant woman's brother-in-law is also of Pakistani descent.

Just before Christmas, two Chinese families and a third of Ugandan descent fled their homes in Donegall Road, in the south of the city, after they were targeted by a gang on the same night.

Chinese

In one of the incidents on December 20, the gang burst into a house, assaulted two pregnant Chinese women and smashed a man in the face with a brick, breaking his nose.

Bricks were thrown through the windows of two other houses in the area soon afterwards.

Duncan Morrow, chief executive of Northern Ireland's Community Relations Council, said more needed to be done to protect minority groups.

"We have a lazy toleration of racism in this area, this has to stop, people are under attack," Morrow said on Thursday.

"Minority groups are vulnerable, not protected by any groups this is a big policing issue."

The Community Relations Council was set up in 1990 to promote better relations between Protestants and Catholics and, equally, recognition of cultural diversity.

- AFP