POLICE moved to quell a second night of rioting in Sydney yesterday after further clashes broke out in the beachside suburb of Cronulla.

Eleven people were injured and seven were arrested after the arrival of a large group of men of Middle Eastern appearance who smashed car windows and other property. A local resident said: “There’s chaos, with ambulances and police going in all directions. Some of the men began trashing every car in sight with baseball bats.”

Similar disturbances were reported in the nearby suburb of Brighton-le-Sands, where a smaller crowd threw bricks at passing cars. The attacks coincided with a large police presence outside a mosque in the suburb of Lakemba, which is home to thousands of Muslims.

The latest trouble followed a day of running battles on Cronulla Beach, the scene of one of the worst outbreaks of racially motivated violence in Australia. Sixteen people were arrested and at least 25 were injured. Police and politicians pledged to crack down on those responsible. Police in New South Wales established a strike force to find those who took part in the riots, which involved several thousand people clashing with youths of mainly Middle Eastern origin.

The violence broke out a week after two Australian lifesavers were allegedly assaulted on the beach by a Lebanese gang. Some residents, fearing that their popular weekend surfing haunt was in danger of becoming a no-go area, threatened anybody of a vaguely Middle Eastern appearance.

Numbers were swelled by a text message campaign that urged Australians to defend their strip of sand from invasion. Outspoken radio presenters also have been criticised for stoking racial hatred.

John Howard, the Prime Minister, said: “Mob violence is always sickening. Attacking people on the basis of their race, their appearance, their ethnicity is totally unacceptable and should be repudiated by all Australians.”

Mr Howard dismissed any suggestion that warnings by his Government about the possibility of attacks by homegrown Islamic terrorists had fuelled the rampage. “It is impossible to know how individuals react, but everything this Government has said about homegrown terrorism has been totally justified,” he said, apparently referring to the arrests last month of 18 Muslim men on terrorism charges.

Morris Iemma, the Premier of New South Wales, who is responsible for law and order in Sydney, said that video and photographic evidence would be used to track down offenders responsible for what he described as the ugly face of racism in Australia: “The police will be unrelenting in their fight against these thugs and hooligans.” Mr Iemma met community leaders last night.

Stephen Kerkyasharian, the chairman of the Community Relations Commission, asserted that the racial violence was clearly premeditated and described it as the worst that Australia had seen in recent times.

He said: “There were some thugs who engaged in unacceptable criminal behaviour that happened to be, in the main, of one particular ethnicity of Lebanese background. Then you had dark forces in our society who saw this opportunity to stir up residents who have had some resentment being built up within them.”

Among the white Australians involved in the clashes on Sunday was a group called the Patriotic Youth League, a nationalist group that is considered to be a neo-Nazi organisation. The league advocates the deportation of immigrants and campaigns against foreign students being allowed to attend Australian universities.

Kuranda Seyit, the director of the Forum on Australia’s Islamic Relations, said: “It was clearly Australian people victimising another ethnic group. It shows that there is underlying racism running deeply in the Australian psyche. It’s been simmering for a few years now, but I think (that in) the latest incident here, people have really let loose their inherent racism and violence.”

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