| Hateland -
Articles |
04/05/02
- Police threat to sue Millwall over officers hurt in
football violence
By Matthew Beard
The Independent
The metropolitan police threatened legal action against
Millwall Football Club yesterday after scores of officers
and police horses were injured in one of the worst nights
of football violence in recent years. Deputy Commissioner
Ian Blair, of Scotland Yard, said he would consult lawyers
over the unprecedented move of suing the club for the
cost of the anti-hooliganism operation and injuries to
47 officers and 26 horses.
In total the Metropolitan Police had to deploy 200 officers,
backed up by 100 British Transport Police. Police have
summoned executives from Millwall and the Football League
to a meeting at Scotland Yard next week, when they will
demand tougher measures to curb the club's persistent
violence problem.
Up to 900 Millwall fans went on the rampage after a 1-0
defeat by Birmingham City on Thursday night, setting fire
to cars, smashing property and attacking officers in violence
considered by some experienced officers to be worse than
the May Day or poll tax riots in central London.
Gangs of several hundred young men had gathered in pubs
and on street corners after the match, a Division One
play-off which took Birmingham City to within one game
of the Premier League. When the hooligans' efforts to
attack Birmingham fans were frustrated, they turned on
a dividing line of officers, pelting them with bricks,
concrete slabs and flares, which police believed were
stockpiled in parked cars as part of a planned attack.
Residents of the Bonhomie estate, focal point for the
worst of the violence, emerged from their homes yesterday
morning to find their cars vandalised and the local playground
reduced to rubble. Some speculated that hooligans were
bent on making trouble after Birmingham City tried to
ban them from travelling to the away leg in the Midlands.
Karen Decosta, a young mother whose car window had been
smashed, said: "When I saw the damage, I asked myself:
what sort of idiots do all this damage in their own neighbourhood?"
Sgt Russell Lamb, who described "battleground scenes"
in Barkworth Road opposite the stadium, said: "I'm
quite sure that it was pre-planned. It felt like it was
too sustained. They knew exactly what they wanted to do."
Drawing its supporter base from the deprived estates of
Bermondsey, Millwall is renowned as London's most violent
club, and some fans take a perverse pleasure in the terrace
chant "No one likes us we don't care".
Millwall's chairman, Theo Paphitis, who has won praise
for attempts to address violence and racism at the club's
New Den stadium, condemned the "evil" hooligans,
but added: "The problem of mob violence is not solely
a Millwall problem, it is not a football problem, it is
a problem which plagues the whole of our society."
Police made only seven arrests on the night, but promised
tough action once they had studied CCTV evidence taken
outside the ground. Last night four men had been charged,
three with public order offences in relation to the violence
outside the Millwall ground.
They are: James Gavin Mullen, 19, of Gravesend, Kent;
Mark Bellchambers, 21, of Enfield, north London; and John
Cornelius Parker, 18, of Hallstead, Kent. Police said
Nigel Simon Haywood, 22, of Dudley, West Midlands, had
been charged with breach of a banning order.
A 25-year-old man and a 22-year-old man arrested outside
the ground have been warned for drunkenness and a 40-year-old
man was released with no further action. |
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