500 arrested over summit protests

POLICE conducted a large raid and rounded up more protesters in an effort to quell further violence at the global economic summit after black-clad youths rampaged through the city, smashing windows and torching police cruisers.

Police arrested more than 500 demonstrators, many of whom were hauled away in plastic handcuffs and taken to a temporary holding centre constructed for the summit.

Thousands of police in riot gear formed cordons to prevent radical anti-globalisation demonstrations from breaching the steel and concrete security fence surrounding the Group of 20 summit site.

Toronto Police Sgt Tim Burrows said police made at least 50 arrests in yesterday’s morning raid on a building on the campus of the University of Toronto, where they seized a cache of “street-type weaponry” such as bricks, sticks and rocks.

The disorder and vandalism occurred just blocks from where US President Barack Obama and other world leaders were meeting and staying.

“What we saw yesterday is a bunch of thugs who pretend to have a difference of opinion with policies and instead choose violence to express those so-called differences of opinion,” Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s chief spokesman, Dimitri Soudas, said yesterday.

The streets of downtown Toronto were quiet at daylight, but protesters gathered yesterday morning at a park near the detention centre – about four kilometres east of where the leaders are meeting.

Police went into the crowd and made some arrests, adopting a more aggressive strategy than the previous day when they stood back as protesters torched four police cars and broke store windows.

Burrows said many of those involved in the violent protests were Canadian. He added that authorities had known of their plans for some time.