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Melbourne, Sep 18 (AFP): Several police officers were wounded and hundreds of protesters were arrested in Australia’s second-most-populous city Saturday in violent clashes at an anti-lockdown march.
\nOfficers used pepper spray and made over 200 arrests in Melbourne as several hundred attendees violated stay-at-home orders and marched through an inner-city suburb.<\/p>\n
The illegal gathering comes as the city goes through its sixth lockdown since the pandemic started, with the wider state of Victoria reporting over 500 cases of Covid-19 on Saturday.<\/p>\n
Police said six officers were taken to hospital after they were pelted with projectiles and trampled in clashes with the crowd of around 700 people.<\/p>\n
“What we saw today was a group of protesters that came together, not to protest freedoms, but simply to take on and have a fight with the police,” Victoria Police Commander Mark Galliott told media.<\/p>\n
Police attempted to reduce access to the centre of the city, blocking roads and stopping public transport in a bid to avoid a repeat of violent scenes at a rally that drew thousands last month.<\/p>\n
But marchers then relocated, with footage from one incident showing a crowd charging through a police line as scuffles erupted along a tram route.<\/p>\n
Huge numbers of police managed to deter a similar gathering in Sydney, with officers swarming a park where the protest had been due to go ahead.<\/p>\n
New South Wales Police said they arrested around 20 people in the city, mainly across the public transport network, while several others were arrested in smaller gatherings around the state.<\/p>\n
Both cities are enduring lengthy lockdowns as authorities race to vaccinate a way out of restrictions amid growing outbreaks.<\/p>\n
Australia successfully pursued “Covid-zero” for most of the pandemic, enabled mainly by closed international borders and restrictions on movements.<\/p>\n
But the arrival of the Delta variant plunged its two largest cities back under stay-at-home orders earlier this year, and authorities are now aiming for a 70 percent vaccination rate before further easing lockdowns.<\/p>\n
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Melbourne, Sep 18 (AFP): Several police officers were wounded and hundreds of protesters were arrested in Australia’s second-most-populous city Saturday in violent clashes at an anti-lockdown march. Officers used pepper spray and made over 200 arrests in Melbourne as several hundred attendees violated stay-at-home orders and marched through an inner-city suburb. The illegal gathering comes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-172057","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-world"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172057","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=172057"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172057\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=172057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=172057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=172057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}