One police station and several vehicles were damaged by the explosion of Molotov cocktails in a series of incidents in the suburbs of Lisbon in the night between Monday and Tuesday, police said on Mondaythe day after clashes on the margins of a demonstration against police violence.
“Three Molotov cocktails thrown at a police station” in the Bela Vista neighbourhood in the municipality of Setubal to the south of the Portuguese capital, the police said in a statement, pointing out that the “acts of vandalism” had not injured anyone.
In the northern suburbs, another series of attacks, “also with Molotov cocktails “, damaged a dozen cars in the communes of Odivelas and Loures, said the police who arrested four suspects, one of whom, aged 18, was taken into custody.” The police are continuing to investigate these two incidents and, at this point, there is nothing to indicate that they are linked to the Monday demonstration in the centre of Lisbon, they added.
Four people were arrested on Monday night after clashes at the end of a demonstration that had mobilized some 200 people denouncing racism and police violence outside the Ministry of the Interior. When the demonstration dispersed in the early evening, several protesters headed for a chic avenue in the centre of Lisbon, Avenida da Liberdade, and vandalized several vehicles before coming up against the police who fought back shooting rubber balls.
The event had been convened in response to a muscled police intervention on Sunday in Seixal, in the southern suburbs of Lisbon, to end a brawl in a sensitive neighbourhood where a large community from the former African colonies of Portugal lives.
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Sans_Attendre
Translated by Act for freedom now!
