By far the harshest penalty issued during a surge of anti-Muslim riots, a British man was sentenced to nine years in prison on Friday for setting a hotel that was housing asylum seekers on fire last month.
On August 4, Thomas Birley, 27, lit a fire in a trashcan outside the entrance of a hotel close to Rotterdam, Northern England, and entered a guilty plea to arson with intent to harm life.
Elisha Kay, the prosecutor, claimed that Birley put wood to an industrial trash that was already on fire and had been set in front of the hotel’s fire entrance while personnel and visitors took cover inside.
Hotel employees, according to Kay, locked themselves in a panic room because they “thought they were going to burn to death.”
Judge Jeremy Richardson jailed Birley at Sheffield Crown Court after Burley entered a guilty plea to violent disorder and possession of an offensive weapon. Judge Richardson noted that Burley’s acts were “suffused with racism from beginning to end.”
Birley was persuaded to join the disorder, according to Richardson, “by malicious and ignorant posts” on social media. The judge declared, “You were a leading participant in ignorant, racist attempts at mob rule.”
About 400 people set upon the hotel after days of riots that included violence, looting, arson, and racist attacks following the July 29 deaths of three young girls in the northern English town of Southport.
After some erroneous material appeared online, the attack was first mistakenly attributed to an Islamist immigrant.
The day after the killings, a peaceful rally in Southport descended into violence, sparking nationwide rioting that resulted in nearly 1,300 arrests and 200 jail sentences.
Up until Friday, the longest sentence pertaining to the riots was six years for violent disturbance. Some people face charges for spreading hate speech online related to race or religion.
