Rioters Pelt Britain’s Top Law Minister

Angry youths pelted Britain’s chief law enforcement minister with bricks and bottles today, touching off a second day of riots in a slum neighborhood after overnight arson left two people dead and 50 buildings gutted, police said.

Two bodies were found in a burned-out post office this morning in Britain’s second-largest city. A police spokesman said officers had stopped searching for other bodies in the wreckage.

The violence was sparked Monday afternoon when about 100 black youths, mostly Caribbean immigrants, began protesting the attempted arrest of a black motorist, police said.

Home Secretary Douglas Hurd, the country’s chief law enforcement officer, arrived today to inspect the smoldering damage on Lozells Road but was pelted with bottles and stones when he tried to speak to a crowd of black youths.

Police hurried him away in a police van. The crowd then stoned two other police vans, overturned one of them and set it ablaze as the other raced away. Two other cars also were overturned as the rampage continued.

Geoffrey Dear, the West Midlands chief constable accompanying Hurd, said he was not surprised by the attack. He said that he had advised Hurd against visiting the area but that Hurd had “asked to come and see what had happened. It was a matter of principle.”

Dear said 300 to 400 youths were responsible for Monday night’s riots, pelting police and firefighters with “hundreds of petrol bombs, roof tiles and chimney stacks.”

Twenty-three police officers and six firefighters were injured in the melee, none seriously.

Police said the overnight rampage was the worst urban violence to hit the country since 1981, when racial riots broke out in slum areas of Liverpool and London.

Opposition politicians blamed the violence on high unemployment and racism.

Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, in Aberdeen on a tour of Scotland, called the riots “utterly appalling” and demanded action by police and community leaders to prevent further violence.

More than 50 buildings in the district were burned out, many of them shops owned by Indians and Pakistanis. Dear said most of the rioters were members of the black immigrant community from the Caribbean.

Birmingham and the surrounding West Midlands area, heart of Britain’s industrial district, have borne the brunt of Thatcher’s tough fiscal measures and the challenges from growing foreign industries, especially the auto industry.

Unemployment is 20%, seven points above the national average, and 49% among adult males in the poor inner-city areas hit by the rioting.