‘It’s scary, it feels like a war zone’

London was a city on the edge last night.

Riots in the UK broke out for a fourth consecutive night yesterday as police dressed in full riot gear were called in to deal with hooded mobs in Manchester and Birmingham.

Cars were overturned and set alight as police battled to contain the mobs, who hurled rocks and stones at them.

Earlier in the day, fear, coupled with anger, was palpable as news of yet another night of riots and looting spread on social media sites and BlackBerry Messenger yesterday afternoon.

Police, fearing the flare-up of violence, deployed 16 000 officers on the streets last night.

As officers stepped up their patrols, shops, fast food outlets and convenience stores which usually stay open until late, shut their doors early.

“Everyone is closing early,” said Anne Hopkins, a pharmacist’s assistant at Duncans Pharmacy in Greenwich, London. “People are afraid. No one is forcing us to close early, people are just doing it as a precaution.”

London has been rocked by four days of sustained looting and mob violence, sparked by the police shooting of Mark Duggan in the suburb of Tottenham in the south-east of the city.

The rioting quickly spread to neighbouring suburbs where hooded teens ran rampant, setting cars and buildings alight, smashing the windows of shops and looting anything that could be carried away. Several homes were damaged in the riots.

In Clapham Junction, a suburb south of London, a South African-owned Wimpy food outlet was smashed up by a mob on Monday night.

“It’s been a mad few days,” said Errol Jones, a Durban-born man who has lived in Ealing for five years.

“I was at a friend’s flat on Monday and could see the flames and smoke from a burning car outside. There were people running wild, screaming and just causing mayhem. It looked like it was a scene from Armageddon.

“I ended up sleeping at my friend’s place that night as it was just too dangerous to go home… Welcome to London,” Jones said.

London’s Metropolitan Police came under severe criticism yesterday from people who accused them of being slow to respond when the violence broke out on Saturday and slow to contain it since then.

Police say the riots were organised by gangs using the highly secure, encrypted BlackBerry network to communicate with each other. The authorities are working with the makers of BlackBerry to gain access to its network in an effort to close in on the ring leaders.

Police officers, many on foot, were deployed across the city and patrolled the streets in groups of three or more while police helicopters, their bright light beams slicing the darkness, scoured the night sky.

“This is scary; it feels like a war zone,” said Jess Harvey, an Australian au pair who has lived in London for a year.

“I’ve never seen so many policemen on the streets. Everyone seems to be a little edgy,” she said.

Duncan Pratt of Lewisham, which was affected by the riots, said seeing a mob rampaging through his neighbourhood was the scariest thing he had lived through.

“The madness about the whole thing was most of these looters and rioters were teenagers. They were youngsters, some of them I don’t even think were 13 yet. To have this level of criminality living among you is hellish, scary,” he said.