Toronto police clashed with protesters for a second straight day on Sunday, with a final standoff played out in the downtown core near the just-finished G20 summit of world leaders.
Police said that 605 protesters had been arrested by late afternoon, while onlookers said many of those arrested came from peaceful protests. The running tally did not include the dozens seen detained by a Reuters witness just blocks away from where the G20 leaders wrapped up talks focused on fixing the ills of the global economy.
Trouble began on Saturday when the anarchists broke away from the main peaceful protest by trade unions and other groups around the summit conference center, and began smashing the windows of banks and chain stores and setting alight police patrol cars in the shopping and financial districts. Footage from the Canadian broadcaster CTV also showed them looting, and threatening photographers.
PHOTO: EPA
Police armed with batons, tear gas, pepper spray and plastic bullets were deployed with mounted officers to try to control the violence, news reports said.
The standoff on Sunday lasted more than five hours, from the late afternoon through to the late evening, as hundreds of police in full riot gear hemmed in protesters at a normally busy downtown intersection. A heavy downpour and a severe thunderstorm warning added to the drama as the standoff continued until 9:43pm.
“We had evidence of Black Bloc [anarchist] people, we had people donning masks in that very group, that’s exactly how everything started yesterday,” said Staff Sergeant Jeff McGuire in explaining why police opted to move against the protesters.
The operation ended abruptly after a heavy downpour, and police released most of the crowd unconditionally, McGuire told reporters. He could not confirm the number arrested.
Earlier, police confronted another group of protesters and fired tear gas for a second straight day. That clash occurred after hundreds of protesters marched on a temporary detention center for demonstrators arrested in Saturday’s riots.
Witnesses saw at least two muzzle blasts, and a police spokeswoman confirmed that “individual applications of tear gas” were fired on the crowd. The blasts are typically used against individuals at close range.
During Saturday’s violence police used tear gas against the public for the first time ever in Toronto.
Among those detained, on charges ranging from mischief to assaulting police, were four people who climbed through the sewer system and emerged near the lock-down area where world leaders were attending the summit.
About 70 people also were detained after police raided the University of Toronto’s downtown campus. Police said they seized weapons, including bricks, rocks and sticks.
A local TV station said that four of its reporters were also among those arrested at the Sunday evening standoff.
“Police are continuing to arrest people who engage in criminal activity,” police spokeswoman Jenn Geary said. “Media are treated just the way anyone else is. If they breach security they’re going to be arrested.”
There was anger at some of the police tactics. In scenes broadcast live in Toronto, an officer in riot gear could be seen striking an apparently unarmed protester several times during a standoff between lines of protesters and police. A Montreal journalist, Stefan Christoff, said he was hit many times by a riot policeman with plastic-coated metal baton after chanting slogans opposed to the G20.
Steve Paikin, who presents TV Ontario’s current affairs program Agenda, saw riot police with rubber bullet guns and smoke bombs break up a peaceful protest which was “like an old sit-in,” he said.
“No one was aggressive, and yet riot squad officers moved in,” he wrote on Twitter. “Police on one side screamed at the crowd to leave one way. Then police on the other side said leave the other way. There was no way out. So the police just started arresting people. This was a peaceful, middle-class crowd. No anarchists. Literally more than 100 officers with guns pointing at the crowd.”
“This is the criminalization of dissent,” said Chelsea Flook, with the Toronto Community Mobilization Network, just after police raided a protester convergence place run by the group in search of members of the Black Bloc.
The tight security has angered some in the city and L Ian MacDonald, a columnist for the Toronto Star, said the city “looked like West Berlin, 1961, not Toronto, 2010.”
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
ON ALERT: A Russian cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace for about 40 seconds, the Polish military said, adding that it is constantly monitoring the war to protect its airspace Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and the western region of Lviv early yesterday came under a “massive” Russian air attack, officials said, while a Russian cruise missile breached Polish airspace, the Polish military said. Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a series of deadly aerial attacks, with yesterday’s strikes coming a day after the Russian military said it had seized the Ukrainian village of Ivanivske, west of Bakhmut. A militant attack on a Moscow concert hall on Friday that killed at least 133 people also became a new flash point between the two archrivals. “Explosions in the capital. Air defense is working. Do not