Police in the United Kingdom city of Belfast have used water cannon to disperse dozens of far-right protesters during a second night of unrest triggered by a knife attack involving a Sudanese refugee.

The clashes on Wednesday came as the family of the stabbing victim appealed for calm and condemned the wave of anti-immigrant violence in the city in Northern Ireland.

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Police said the protesters threw “missiles” such as rocks and bottles at officers, while images from the scene showed several fires burning on the streets.

Police said officers deployed “water cannon in an attempt to maintain public order”.

But the unrest was markedly less severe than on Tuesday evening, when hundreds of masked men burned families out of their homes and set vehicles alight.

“We want to make it absolutely clear that overnight unrest is not welcome, and peaceful protest is the only way forward,” the family of the victim, Stephen Ogilvie, said in a statement.

“We have many migrants who make a deeply valuable contribution to our country… We do not want this terrible tragedy to be used to divide people or fuel hostility,” it said.

The family added that Ogilvie, who lost an eye and suffered serious wounds to his neck and face, was in a stable condition.

Suspect appears in court

Their appeal came as the suspect in the attack, a 30-year-old ‌Sudanese national named Hadi Alodid, appeared in court on charges including attempted murder.

He was remanded in custody, and the case was adjourned to July 8.

Videos of the stabbing attack circulated online all day on Tuesday, sparking calls on social media for violent protest. Police had to help one family escape from a burning house, according to the Reuters news agency, while several cars and a bus were set on fire and reduced to shells.

Local politicians and a pastor said many of those targeted were Black.

UK minister Ruth Anderson said at least 27 people were made homeless in Belfast “because people went door-to-door to try and target foreign nationals”.

Resident Jamie Corry, 33, said he could only watch on as his house went up in flames.

“I was actually standing right there watching my whole house just go up, slowly but surely,” he told Reuters. “I told them and all, when they were lighting a car up on fire, ‘that’s my property, that’s my property’… and they still didn’t care.”

The attack comes at a time of heightened tensions in the UK following the murder of a student in Southampton who was handcuffed by police as he lay dying from stab wounds after his killer, a Sikh man, had falsely alleged a racist attack.

Tech billionaire Elon Musk reposted many messages that blamed migration on violence in the UK, sharing a post that argued that the “very deliberate policy of mass uncontrolled immigration and open borders” is increasing tensions.

‘Bad faith actors’

Amid calls from Musk, other far-right agitators like Tommy Robinson called for more protests on Wednesday, Northern Ireland’s police chief said ⁠an extra 200 officers were being deployed on the streets.

“These idiots didn’t just target ethnic minority groups… they targeted society,” Chief ⁠Constable Jon Boutcher said of Tuesday night’s rioters.

Officers had to take a family that included a two-month-old baby to safety during Tuesday’s violence, which he branded “a huge act of self-harm by mindless idiots”.

Speaking in London, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer said the knife attack raised serious questions, but that “driving people out of their homes is not … the right way to respond”.

He condemned the unrest as “shocking and completely unacceptable”.

Anna Turley, the chairwoman of the UK’s governing Labour Party, meanwhile, said that online platforms were “playing a role in driving” the unrest and suggested Musk was one of the “bad faith actors” inflaming tensions.

The United Nations human rights chief Volker Turk condemned what he called “incitement” on social media. “Dehumanisation of whole groups within a society is totally unacceptable and frankly despicable,” he told reporters in Geneva, adding that the violence in both Northern Ireland and Southampton had been “really shocking”.

Social media providers, he insisted, must take seriously their responsibility to prevent hate speech and incitement to violence.

Immigration has historically been low in Northern Ireland, partly due to the three-decade conflict between mainly Catholic Irish nationalists seeking Irish unity and predominantly Protestant pro-British “loyalists” wanting to stay in the UK and the British military.

However, migration has increased in recent years, and there has been an increasing sentiment against it in both Northern Ireland and parts of the Republic of Ireland.