Up to 100 anti-G8 protesters were arrested in violent clashes with police in Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland, police said early on Tuesday.
Riot police said they were bombarded with paving stones and bricks during several hours of pitched battles with 1 000 police in the city centre late on Monday.
Many of the protesters were due to appear in court on Tuesday.
More than 20 protesters and some police officers were injured in the clashes, which brought the city centre to a standstill.
Critics said police had ”overreacted” in their response to the violence, which the police blamed on ”key anarchist elements.”
They said the protesters had come from across Europe.
The heads of government of the G8 grouping of leading industrial nations plus the Russian Federation are meeting at Gleneagles, northwest of Edinburgh, for a three-day summit starting on Wednesday.
Crowd-control
Meanwhile, Hong Kong has sent two police officers to Scotland to observe protests at the summit as part of preparations for a World Trade Organisation.
The officers observed clashes between anti-globalisation groups and police in the Scottish capital Edinburgh on Monday, two days before the leaders of the world’s most powerful nations meet to discuss trade, poverty and global warming.
Hong Kong police hope the mission will provide insight into riot-control methods should protests at the WTO summit in the Chinese territory in December get out of hand, the source said.
”It’s part of a general observation of crowd-control tactics at all the world trade meetings,” said the source.
Hong Kong’s police have little experience in handling large-scale disruption and are keen to avoid the sort of violence that marred similar world trade meetings in Genoa and Seattle in past years.
Protest leaders expect some 20 000 demonstrators to descend on Hong Kong for the December 13-18 sumit.
But they have labelled police ”trigger-happy” following reports that officers have been stocking up on rubber bullets, riot shields and other heavy duty crowd-control equipment. – Sapa-AFP