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Tension over damage to graves

Hasan Suroor

LONDON: Two weeks after Asian and African youths in Birmingham fought pitched battles over allegations of an assault on a Jamaican girl, racial tension flared up again in the city on Friday after more than 40 Muslim graves in a local cemetery were desecrated on Id day. Anti-Muslim leaflets, attributed to a hitherto unknown group "Black Nation,'' were found near the smashed graves. The local African community and the police said they had never heard of such a group. They suspected that a far-Right group might be trying to stir up trouble by exploiting the simmering tension between African and Muslim communities after the recent race riots. Suhail Siddiq, who reported the incident, said he had gone to visit his relatives' graves when he saw that many of them had been "pushed over and smashed''. "It's an absolute disgrace.'' Angry Muslim youths collected outside the cemetery but a heavy police presence and repeated appeals by community leaders for calm helped defuse the situation. Police said it was being treated as a case of "racially aggravated criminal damage.'' Khalid Mahmood, the local Labour MP, said he suspected that groups from outside the local communities were trying to "incite'' racial tensions. "I hope this does not ruin all the hard work that the Pakistani Muslim, African-Caribbean and Hindu and Sikh communities have been doing to calm things down here in the past 10 days,'' he said. There was still no trace of the girl at the centre of the rape allegation that sparked the riots two weeks ago.

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