A southern Portuguese town was calm late on Wednesday, police said, after two consecutive nights of violent clashes that brought the arrest of more than 40 people, almost all of them English.
Police stepped up night-time patrols in the streets of Albufeira, a vacation resort on the Algarve coast, and promised to act quickly against troublemakers.
”It’s all calm” in Albufeira, police spokesperson Captain Manuel Jorge said by telephone.
”We’ve got more men on duty and we’re going to move quickly to stamp out problems before they get out of control,” he said.
Riot police, supported by dogs and mounted police, were deployed in Albufeira on Monday and Tuesday after mostly English men at bars in the town centre tried to break windows and harassed local people.
They threw glasses and bottles at police during hours-long street battles. More than a dozen people were hurt.
An Albufeira court on Wednesday ordered the deportation of 11 Englishmen detained in Monday night’s clashes.
One of the Englishmen, named as 47-year-old Gary Mann, was convicted on violent public disorder charges and sentenced to two years in jail. He was to serve his sentence in England. One other man was freed.
Police detained another 34 people in a repeat of the trouble on Tuesday night. Those men — 33 Englishmen and one Dutchman — were due in court on Thursday.
The confrontations were the worst crowd violence seen in Portugal in recent years.
Both Uefa and police said the disturbances were unrelated to Euro 2004 soccer games, though they admitted some of those involved could be fans attending the tournament.
David Swift, the chief British police officer liaising with police in Portugal, said several hundred English people were involved in the confrontations, but described them as drunken thugs, not soccer hooligans.
There is ”no indication that these individuals are anything other than English yobs [hooligans],” he said.
”The connection with the game [of soccer] is non-existent,” Swift told a news conference in Lisbon.
British police stopped almost 2Â 700 known or convicted soccer hooligans from traveling to the European Championship in Portugal in an effort to prevent the large-scale rioting that tainted Euro 2000 in Belgium and the Netherlands and the 1998 World Cup in France.
Uefa, European soccer’s governing body, has previously threatened to throw England out of the tournament if its fans misbehave again.
But Uefa also continued to consider the disturbances in Albufeira as unconnected to Euro 2004.
”This is unrelated to football. It is miles away from any match,” Uefa spokesperson William Gaillard said. ”It is something which, unfortunately, often happens during summer round the Mediterranean.”
Swift noted there were no incidents around last Sunday’s game between France and England.
He said authorities expected some 20Â 000 England fans from across Portugal to attend Thursday’s game against Switzerland in Coimbra, in northern Portugal.
In the British parliament, Prime Minister Tony Blair condemned the violence in Albufeira. He said they ”bring shame on our country and on the vast majority of England football fans who just want to enjoy the game”. — Sapa