AUSTRALIA: Aborigines rioted in a black ghetto near the centre of Australia's largest city, Sydney, until early yesterday over the death of a young cyclist, in a battle that lasted nine hours.
Some 40 of the 200 police were injured in one of the worst outbreaks of civil unrest in the city in at least a decade.
Armed with rubbish bins filled with paving stones and beer bottles, Molotov cocktails and fireworks, about 100 Aborigines attacked police and set fire to a railway station in Redfern, an inner-city suburb that is home to a notorious Aboriginal area called "the Block".
Protesters, some bare-chested with T-shirts wrapped around their faces, pelted lines of riot police with bricks and bottles, at one stage pushing a burning rubbish bin on wheels towards police and setting off fireworks among them.
"They were throwing Molotov cocktails both at police and at Redfern railway station during the course of the riot," assistant police commissioner Mr Bob Waites said yesterday.
Waites said rioters had eight rubbish bins loaded with paving stones to be used as missiles and large tubs of beer bottles.
Five people were arrested either during or after the riot, but it was not clear how many Aborigines were injured.
The riot was triggered by the death of Aborigine Thomas Hickey (17), who was impaled on a metal fence after falling from his bicycle on Saturday. He died in hospital on Sunday morning. His mother said her son was injured while being pursued by police.
Police say patrolling officers merely passed by the boy who then sped off, losing control of his bike.
Redfern Aboriginal elder Mr Lyall Munro said relations between Aborigines and the police were at an all-time low, adding that police harassed young blacks on a daily basis.
Aborigines remain Australia's most disadvantaged group, dying 20 years younger than other Australians, with far higher rates of imprisonment, unemployment and welfare dependency.