The arrest of 21 people and the huge police presence in the northern English town of Oldham prevented serious violence overnight after a weekend of race rioting between whites and Asians, police said on Tuesday.
Large numbers of police were deployed on the streets of the industrial town after rival gangs battled each other and police with stones and petrol bombs on Saturday and Sunday in Britain's worst racial violence in 15 years.
The unrest, which the authorities said was provoked by white extremist groups from outside the Oldham area, shocked local community leaders and the nation at large in the run-up to Britain's June 7 national election.
Police arrested 18 white youths and three Asians, mainly for public order offences, during a night of relative quiet. "The evening has been more vandalism than violence," a police spokesman told Reuters.
As day broke, teams of workmen took to the streets to clean up the debris, trying to restore an air of normality to a town whose ethnic tensions exploded in a weekend of petrol bombs, stone-throwing and skirmishes.
Police said they had arrested a total of 49 people in riots over the three-day holiday weekend, two-thirds of them white, the rest Asian.
"A lot of videotape is being examined and we'll be making a lot of arrests in coming days," said police chief superintendent Eric Hewitt.
As workmen started the big clean-up, senior police and council officers held lengthy talks with leaders of Oldham's Asian minorities -- mainly Pakistani, Kashmiri and Bangladeshi -- to try to repair community relations.
The continued presence of ultra-right racist youths remained the Asians' main concern.
Two far-right groups -- the National Front and the British National Party -- have stepped up their activities in the town, casting a menacing shadow over already strained race relations -- OLDHAM, England (Reuters)
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