Riot police and protesters in Toronto, where hundreds of protesters were held in a disused warehouse last night after officers went on the offensive against demonstrations that left squad cars ablaze and shop windows smashed.
Police raided university buildings a mile from the conference centre where the G20 was being held yesterday morning, arresting 70 people and confiscating bricks, bats and fluid-filled bottles. Some of those arrested were pulled from bushes where they claimed to be sleeping. Others were being held after emerging through manhole covers that were then welded shut.
More than 470 arrests were made on Saturday, when anarchists tried to breach the cordon around the hotel where world leaders met for dinner. The violence has appalled a city that prides itself on tolerance.
The busy hub was abandoned for four days by tourists and shoppers for a summit that few Canadians wanted to host and which cost US$1 billion for security alone. The city was repopulated by riot police whose handling of the protests has been condemned as heavy-handed.
Emergency powers allowed police to demand identification and arrest anyone coming within five metres of the security fences sealing off central Toronto. Few of those held appear to fall into that category. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association told The Times: “This was policing gone out of control.”
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On Saturday police drove two squad cars into a crowd of several thousand protesters on the edge of the city’s financial district and left them there, according to observers. When they were set alight, officers fired rubber bullets and tear gas into the crowd but fire engines did not arrive for nearly an hour, prompting questions as to whether the authorities were seeking a pretext for mass arrests.
Hours later The Times witnessed the arrest of roughly 150 demonstrators staging a sit-down protest on the Esplanade, a street of restaurants east of the financial district. Charged with breaching the peace, they were driven away in convoys of police vans.
A spokesman for the Canadian Prime Minister called the protesters “a bunch of thugs”. Dmitry Soudas said that the demonstrators “pretend to have a difference of opinion with policies and instead choose violence in order to express those so-called differences of opinion.”