News photographer injured in Belfast riots

Belfast, Northern Ireland: A British news photographer was shot in the leg as hundreds of masked youth hurled bricks, bottles and gasoline bombs during a second night of sectarian violence at a Catholic-Protestant flashpoint in Belfast.

The Press Association agency said on Wednesday that the photographer suffered a leg injury and was in stable condition at Royal Victoria Hospital. The agency did not release the name of the photographer.

Other journalists on the scene said that a gunman had shot at photographers covering the previous night's violence.

About 700 people gathered on the street in the Short Strand, a small Catholic community in a predominantly Protestant area of east Belfast.

Masked and hooded youth threw bricks, bottles, fireworks and other missiles at each other, and at armored police vehicles. Police fired plastic bullets at the marauding youth.

Sectarian tensions typically flare in the build-up to July 12, a divisive holiday when tens of thousands of Protestants from the Orange Order brotherhood march across Northern Ireland.

This year's violence is among the most intense in years, but confined to a small and historically tense area of Belfast.

Police said that the violence started on Monday when masked members of the Ulster Volunteer Force - a paramilitary Protestant group which claims to have disarmed - attacked Catholic homes with bricks, fireworks and smoke bombs.

Catholic leaders said that the violence was unprovoked, but Protestant leaders said that the mob appeared to be retaliating for smaller-scale attacks by Short Strand youth on Protestant homes.

The area affected by the rioting is one of more than 30 parts of Belfast where high barricades separate Irish Catholic and British Protestant turf. The barricades, called "peace lines" locally, have grown in number and size, despite the success of Northern Ireland's 1998 peace accord.

Northern Ireland's Protestant First Minister, Peter Robinson, and his Catholic deputy, Martin McGuinness, condemned the violence.

"A small minority of individuals are clearly determined to destabilize our communities," McGuinness said. "They will not be allowed to drag us back to the past."