A young man who took part in an arson attack near a hotel housing asylum seekers in Rotherham, northern England, was given a sentence on Thursday. nine-year prison sentencethe most significant to date compared to the last wave of riots in uk.
Sheffield Crown Court convicted the man, identified as Thomas Birley, 27, of Rotherham, of his “undisputed” involvement in several of the violent unrest arrived on August 4th in this English city.
Judge Jeremy Richardson found Birley guilty of “arson with intent to endanger life” -the first person to receive this sentence- and commented that it was one of the more serious cases those he had faced during the Rotherham altercations.
Birley was caught on security cameras throwing objects at police officersconfronting them with a baton and throwing a container at the riot cordon during a day of more than 12 hours of violence that left 64 police officers injured.
The 27-year-old man was also involved in adding firewood to a burning industrial container located several exits from the Holiday Inn Express hotel in Rotherham, where more than 200 asylum seekers were staying, along with staff at the hotel, who were locked inside.
According to local media, during the trial, several employees assured the magistrate that They thought they were going to “burn alive” because smoke was seeping through cracks in the building and 22 of them took refuge in the hotel’s panic room.
For this reason, Judge Richardson said he had to impose a broad sentence because of the “a persistent danger” from Birley.
The deaths of three girls and a dozen others injured in multiple knife attacks on July 29 in Southport (north-west England) at the hands of a young Welshman of Rwandan parents have triggered a wave of xenophobic and Islamophobic violence in various cities across the United Kingdom, with more than a thousand people arrested.
