Nearly 100 people were injured and more than 600 detained in a second night of rioting in the Estonian capital Tallinn after the removal of a Soviet war memorial, officials said yesterday.
Ninety-six people were injured, including seven police officers, as gangs made up mainly of young Russian speakers ran riot in Tallinn, smashing the windows of the Art Academy, breaking into the National Theater and robbing shops, police said.
Some 600 people were detained in Tallinn, twice the number as the previous night, police said.
PHOTO: AP
"We detained more last night as the youths were more aggressive and refused to disperse," police spokesman Taavi Kullerkupp said on national radio.
Another 40 people were detained after several hundred people rampaged through Johvi, a town 165km northeast of Tallinn in a region inhabited mainly by ethnic Russians.
Rioting had first erupted in Tallinn on Thursday night when police tried to prevent a small group of youths from breaking through a security cordon set up around a towering bronze figure of a Red Army soldier ahead of the statue's removal.
The Russian foreign ministry said yesterday that a Russian citizen had been killed in the unrest in Tallinn, which is the worst since Estonia regained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.
Gerrit Maesalu, a spokesman for the Estonian prosecutor's office in Tallinn, confirmed that a 21-year-old named Dmitri, who died after being stabbed during the first night of violence, "was a citizen of the Russian Federation."
The Russians have accused Estonian law enforcement officers of using excessive force to quell the violence, but Maesalu stressed that there was "no reason to link Dmitri's death to police activity."
The Bronze Soldier was moved to a secret location in the early hours of Friday in an attempt to prevent more riots.
Yesterday, only a handful of people were in the square where the monument used to stand.
Concrete barricades have been erected in front of parliament after around 60 youngsters demonstrated outside, shouting "Fascists" in Russian and calling on Estonian Prime Minister Andrus Ansip to come out.
The last time the Estonian parliament was barricaded was in 1991, when Soviet tanks advanced on Tallinn to crush the drive for independence.
In Johvi, rioters smashed windows and vandalized a statue of General Aleksander Tonisson, who led an Estonian army unit against the Russians during Estonia's war of independence in 1918.
The statue of Tonisson, who went on to become mayor of Tallinn and was executed by the Soviets when they first occupied Estonia in 1940, was doused in a flammable liquid and set on fire.
Estonia was briefly independent between the two world wars, before being occupied by the Soviets at the start of World War II and then by the Nazis.
It was forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union at the end of the war and only regained independence in 1991, when the USSR crumbled.
The Bronze Soldier Soviet war memorial at the heart of the unrest is seen by Estonians as a symbol of 50 years of Soviet occupation, during which tens of thousands of Estonians were murdered or deported and large numbers of ethnic Russians shipped in as Moscow tried to "russify" the Baltics.
Russia considers it a sacred memorial to the Red Army soldiers who defeated Nazism in World War II.
Russia reacted angrily after the statue was moved. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov accused the Estonian government of fomenting tensions, and the Russian senate passed a resolution calling for diplomatic relations with Estonia to be broken off.
Gangs of youths in downtown Tallinn shouted "Rossiya! Rossiya!" (Russia in Russian) and waved Russian flags in the overnight unrest, as police tried to keep them away from aggressive Estonian youths.
The government said it had restricted access to its Website yesterday after an increase in attacks "originating from servers in other countries."
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion