Night of UK terror

By Bridget Cook
VIOLENT rioters causing havoc in London left a Cranbourne South family in fear during their holiday in the UK this week.
Lauren van den Elst, 20, had been on holiday with her family for three days when riots broke out in Brixton on Sunday night (UK time), near the home where they were staying with relatives.
Lauren, along with her sister Caitlyn, 18, and brother Matt, 12, went for a trip to see Buckingham Palace at night and returned to the south London suburb later to find a violent mob attacking police by throwing bottles and glass.
“We caught the train back to Brixton about 11pm and started walking from the station back to the house,” she said.
“As we turned the corner, we saw a massive group of police grouped under the bridge in the middle of the street with their big shields and a few squad vans parked on the road.
“The officers just told us to stand back and all of a sudden we see all these people running towards the police throwing bottles and glasses at them and over the bridge into the street below.
“The police blocked the rioters with their shields so they didn’t get past the bridge and smashed a few people with their batons, but some police started running towards us, so I was screaming ‘don’t come near us they’re obviously aiming at you’.
“They (police) didn’t do anything to help us or anyone standing by, obviously we shouldn’t have been there but that’s the only route we knew so had no idea how to get home.”
Lauren said eventually they found an alternative route and as they made their way back they could see smashed shop windows in the distance, two burnt-out cars and smoke in the middle of the street.
“We could still hear screaming and yelling and police sirens,” she said.
“As soon as Matt saw the glass and bottles being thrown he burst out in tears and wouldn’t stop until about half-an-hour after we got home.
“We were all scared, but especially Matt, he was terrified.”
London has been in turmoil since the first riots broke out following a protest in the north London suburb of Tottenham on the weekend over the police shooting of 29-year-old Mark Duggan.
Riots have spread across the country and continued to spread when the News went to print yesterday.
Gangs have been setting fire to police cars and other vehicles, looting and torching shops and buildings and ripping ATMs from the walls in a series of attacks across major cities in the UK. Lauren said she was in nearby Croydon having dinner at a relative’s home on Monday night just moments before riots broke out there – one of the worst places to be hit.
Lauren said despite the frightening experience, the riots had not wrecked their holiday.
“For us, everything on the streets feels normal now, but for the people that live here it’s a different story,” she said on Tuesday.
“They don’t know what to expect or whether it will be their town hit next.
“It seems like people have forgotten about Duggan and it has just become about violence and people trying to grab as much free stuff as they can.
“It seems like the police have no control over it and it’s just moving from one town to the next.”