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Armed protest quelled inside overcrowded British detention center

Nov. 5 (UPI) — Detainees at an immigration removal center near London armed themselves and staged a “disturbance” on Saturday, Britain’s Home Office said.

The protest began after an early-morning power outage when the detainees left their rooms and congregated in the courtyard of the Harmondsworth detention center.

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They eventually returned to their rooms and nobody was injured, the Home Office reported, saying they did have various weaponry.

Dozens of detainees were armed with knives and lumps of wood, CNN reported.

Members from the Metropolitan Police were called in to assist.

The detention center is located not far from the city’s Heathrow Airport and houses hundreds of people, ranging from adult male asylum seekers to foreign offenders awaiting deportation as well as men who are in Britain illegally.

British officials raised concerns less than a week ago about overcrowding and other issues at the facility as well as the country’s migration system as a whole.

Conservative lawmaker Roger Gale called the entire system “wholly unacceptable” as it currently stands. Gale made the comments outside the Manston migration center in Kent, in southeast England, which houses 4,000 people despite being designed to hold only 1,500.

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“[Staff are] trying to do a good job under impossible circumstances,” Gale told reporters Monday.

About 100 people at the Harmondsworth detention center were due to be moved to Manson on Saturday, before the protest broke out, despite the overcrowding issue.

This follows a separate incident at an immigration center in Dover on Oct. 30.

During the attack, a number of crude incendiary devices were thrown outside the premises by a man who arrived at the scene alone in a car.

Police say that attack was “motivated by a terrorist ideology.”

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