Hundreds of Muslim men gathered on the streets of Birmingham amid a seventh day of disorder on Britain’s streets in the wake of a knife attack which left three girls dead in Southport. 

Men wearing masks and balaclavas, with some carrying Palestinian flags, formed a protective ring around a mosque near a McDonald’s in the city amid speculation that there would be a far-Right demonstration.

People were also seen standing guard around the Village Islamic Centre, with local shops shut and a hospital sending staff home in anticipation of violence.

It came as far-Right and anti-racism protesters faced off in Plymouth, where three police officers were left injured during the clashes. 

Police largely held the two groups apart but the Devon and Cornwall force said officers were met with “sustained violence”. 

The force has deployed 150 officers in the city centre where two protest groups have formed and said on Monday night that arrests were “ongoing”. Six people have been arrested so far.

In Birmingham, a crowd of men, some wearing masks and hoods, could be heard chanting “Allahu Akbar” as they vowed to “protect” themselves in a video posted on X, formerly Twitter. 

One man was seen to be wielding what appeared to be a large bat.

During a Sky News live broadcast, presenter Becky Johnson was interrupted by a masked protester at the same site who sped up behind her on a motorbike.

He shouted “yo, free Palestine, f*** the EDL” in a clip shared online.

The broadcast was quickly ended and security sent to the reporter, according to Sky News.

The broadcaster said a man in a balaclava stabbed the tyre of one of its broadcast vans but did not damage it and it escaped without suffering any damage. 

A former independent MP candidate urged his fellow Muslims not to “go out” and “confront” Right-wing extremists, , arguing that this was what the protesters wanted.

Shakeel Afsar, who unsuccessfully stood for the Birmingham Hall Green and Mosley seat, told followers in a video on X: “We must not give the Right-wing extremists what they want. When they’re turning up to city centres there is no need for us to go there and try to confront them.

“Yes, if they announce that they are doing a protest outside a Masjid [mosque], you have the right to go inside, pray and defend the Masjid. But if they’re coming into city centres, my dear brothers, do not go there.”

Mr Afsar previously led a religious protest over LGBT lessons outside a primary school in Birmingham, despite having no children at the school himself. The demonstration was later banned by a judge.

It came as British Muslims warned others to pray before leaving the house and to not walk the streets alone amid fears they would be targeted by far-riot rioters.

On TikTok, a Muslim woman warned more than 11,000 followers to take precautions when leaving the house.

Others took to social media to claim they were frightened to take their children out, while other women claimed they had chosen to temporarily not wear their hijabs, for fear the head scarf would draw unwanted attention.

In a clip shared on social media, a video appeared to show vandalised Muslim graves in a Lancashire cemetery.

Footage showed white paint splashed over the gravestones.

“This is appalling and another new low,” the poster wrote on X.

“Muslim gravestones within a cemetery in Burnley have been vandalised with white paint and desecrated.”

Police said they were treating the incident as a hate crime.

Meanwhile, residents outside the Waterloo Road mosque in Middlesbrough, told journalists: “We’re going to be paying for this, and for what?

“This has got nothing to do with three little girls that have lost their lives. They’ve used it to cause utter mayhem on our streets.”

Three police officers have been injured during riots in Plymouth and a police van has been damaged. 

Devon and Cornwall Police said six people were arrested on Monday night and work was ongoing to “de-escalate the situation”.

Several officers also suffered injuries in the violence, Devon and Cornwall Police said. Two members of the public were taken to hospital. 

The force deployed 150 officers in the city centre where two protest groups formed.

Officers detained a man on the floor, as protesters launched missiles and fireworks at a counter-demonstration where people held signs stating “No Place for Hate” and “Say No to Nazis”.

Speaking at the scene, bronze commander Inspector Ryan North Moore told Sky News: “This is not a protest anymore. In my opinion, this is violence. This is sustained violence.

“Unfortunately, large masonry was thrown at us, whether it was aimed at us or others or opposing groups – we don’t know yet. The investigation will identify that. But, yes, three officers down.”

Asked how difficult it was to police the protest, Inspector Moore said: “It’s off the scale today. With the resources we’ve got, it’s difficult.”

In a post on social media, Devon and Cornwall Police said: “We currently have 150 officers deployed in Plymouth City Centre. Violence will not be tolerated, hate will not be tolerated. Work is ongoing to de-escalate the situation.”

The violent scenes come on the seventh day of disorder in the wake of a knife attack in Southport last week which left three girls dead.

Armed Forces minister Luke Pollard said protesters who have “thrown projectiles at people” are “not what Plymouth is about”.

In a video posted to X, formerly Twitter, the MP for Plymouth Sutton and Devonport said: “There is absolutely no place for violence on our streets. There’s no place for hate on our streets.

“Plymouth is a brilliant place to live, work and play. The diversity of our city makes us stronger – doesn’t make us weaker.

“And we know that those people who have come to our city tonight, who have brought violence onto our streets, who have thrown projectiles at people, who have abused people because of their background or their skin colour or their faith, they have no place in our city.

“That’s not what Plymouth is about – that’s not who we are. Thank you to the police for keeping us safe, to services from the city council to local businesses who have all taken steps to reassure people, to keep people safe.

“We have still got a long way to go tonight, but there is no place for hate in Plymouth, no place for violence on our streets.” 

The wife of a jailed banker has forfeited her London Knightsbridge home and a golf club in Ascot after spending more than £16 million on shopping trips to Harrods.

Zamira Hajiyeva, 61 whose husband Jahangir Hajiyev, 62, is serving a 16-year jail sentence in Baku for fraud and embezzlement, had been pursued by the National Crime Agency (NCA) over the source of her considerable fortune.

The NCA said it believed her assets were obtained as a “direct result of large-scale fraud and embezzlement, false accounting and money laundering” and in 2018 she became the subject of Britain’s first unexplained wealth order (UWO).

Officials applied for a property freezing order in relation to her Knightsbridge home as well as Mill Ride golf and country club in Ascot which she bought for £10.5 million.

The High Court concluded the properties had been purchased as a result of criminal activity and were therefore recoverable.

No finding was made in relation to Mrs Hajiyeva’s knowledge of how the properties were paid for.

Jahangir Hajiyev is the former chairman of the state-owned International Bank of Azerbaijan and was convicted in 2016 of defrauding the bank out of £2.2 billion.

His official salary between 2001 and 2008 was £54,000 a year, but he was later estimated to be worth £55 million.

During a court hearing after the initial UWO was issued, details of Mrs Hajiyeva’s lavish spending habits were laid bare, including that she had spent £16.3 million at Harrods between 2006 and 2016.

NCA investigators claimed she had used 35 different credit cards issued by her husband’s bank to fund shopping sprees and on one occasion had spent £150,000 on jewellery.

Mrs Hajiyeva also owned a £35 million private jet and had a wine cellar stocked with some of the world’s most expensive vintages.

Tim Quarrelle, branch commander for asset denial at the NCA, said: “NCA officers worked tirelessly to track the complex movement of these funds across the international banking system, through shell companies in multiple jurisdictions, in order to ascertain their source.

“This result comes almost six-and-a-half years after we served Mrs Hajiyeva with the first unexplained wealth order ever granted, and highlights our commitment to using all the tools at our disposal to combat the flow of illicit money into, and through, the UK.”

Simon Armstrong, deputy director at NCA Legal, said: “The NCA’s investigation was followed by complex and lengthy litigation, which saw lawyers address numerous challenges and use legal powers introduced by the Criminal Finances Act 2017 to successfully recover assets worth millions of pounds.

“This fantastic result demonstrates how the NCA will deploy all the powers available to identify, pursue and recover the proceeds of crime.”

Neonatal nurses are resigning from Britain’s baby units because they fear being accused of harming infants like in the case of Lucy Letby, a consultant has claimed in a new Channel 5 documentary.

In the documentary, which looks into concerns with the Letby conviction, Dr Svilena Dimitrova, a consultant neonatologist, warned that NHS problems were “endemic” and nurses were frightened they could be scapegoated for failing wards.

In August last year, Letby was convicted of the murders of seven newborns and the attempted murders of six other infants at the Countess of Chester Hospital. A retrial in July found her guilty of the attempted murder of another child.

But several scientists and doctors have since questioned the evidence, and there are concerns that not enough weight was given in the trial to levels of understaffing, poor practice and cramped conditions in the baby unit.

Since the trial it has also emerged that the ward struggled to contain infectious outbreaks that may have put the babies at risk.

Dr Dimitrova, who works for Brighton and Sussex University Hospital Trust, said: “The NHS is not what it used to be, when I started working within it. We are enormously challenged and suboptimal outcomes occur.

“I have worked in more than 15 hospitals in my career, and I’ve worked on five surgical neonatal units, and these issues are endemic.

“We can see issues that have now come to light with regards to the circumstances at the Countess of Chester, which we suspect have played a very big role in the increased incidences of deaths in these years.

“What it has definitely led to is huge fear, amid, especially the neonatal nursing body. I have never seen so many nurses resign as I have seen in the past 18 months.”

‘It’s made us worried’

An experienced neonatal nurse, who chose to remain anonymous, told the documentary-makers the Letby conviction had left staff concerned that they may be accused of killing babies.

“It’s made me and others quite worried,” she said. “I think there is a general fear of speaking up.

“The conviction has had a negative effect on our profession, it’s made us more worried about what the parents might think.

“I think it’s alarming how they’ve thrown allegations at Lucy. I realise how easily it could have been one of my colleagues or me. What’s gone on with Lucy is very close to home.”

‘Multiple problems’

Experts interviewed for the film said that the Countess of Chester had “multiple problems” and that “adverse outcomes often occur in such situations”.

An investigation by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health found that in 2017 there were organisational and environmental issues with the ward and major issues with understaffing, but the report was not shown to the jury.

As revealed this weekend in The Telegraph, the hospital had also struggled to get rid of a dangerous bacteria which had colonised taps in the neonatal unit, during the period when deaths spiked. But the jury was not told about the infection risk.

Dr Faye Skelton, programme lead of applied criminology and forensic psychology at Edinburgh Napier University, told the documentary-makers: “Lucy was an extremely experienced nurse and colleagues trusted her.

“It doesn’t seem to me that Lucy Letby being a murderer is the only explanation for all of these things happening.”

Experts also said that doctors and scientists were frightened to come forward to give evidence in the defence of people accused of harming children.

During Letby’s original trial, the prosecution called six experts but the defence did not call any.

Dr Waney Squier, whose own career was ruined when she gave evidence in the appeal case of a shaken baby, said she was not surprised that defence experts had not come forward.

Dr Squier was struck off the medical register after it was ruled she had misled the court over her evidence, but the decision was later overturned after a judge found she had not acted dishonestly.

“I think the fact there were no defence experts reflects what’s been going on in this country and it’s worse than in many places around the world,” she said.

“But there are not doctors who are willing to stand up in defence cases where there are babies and it may be challenging a lot of other people or a mainstream view, because they are frightened of being hounded out of their careers.”

Chester Police and the Countess of Chester Hospital said they could not comment while inquiries were ongoing. The Thirlwall Inquiry is due to look into issues at the hospital.

Lucy Letby: Did She Really Do It? aired at 9pm Channel 5 on Monday and on My5.

A biomedical scientist who called her Portuguese neighbour a “Spanish whore” and “slag” during a row over a fire alarm was reported to police for a hate crime.

Kelly Madden launched a foul-mouthed rant at her neighbour after drinking “an entire bottle of cheap rosé by accident”, a disciplinary hearing was told.

She was charged by the police and handed a caution for the “racist slur”, before being suspended from the Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC) by a tribunal.

Now, after a review hearing, Ms Madden has been struck off after a panel concluded that that was the only way to “protect the public”.

‘I just wanted her to stop screaming’

She was reported to police by her neighbour, a young Portuguese woman, following an argument the pair had in July 2020 in Norwich in when Ms Madden set off fire alarms in her building by mistake. She had activated the alarm “preparing soup” on a hot day, a disciplinary hearing was told.

In a statement, Ms Madden said: “The fire alarm activated the other fire alarms and my neighbour became extremely agitated and was shouting in the hall and on the landing.

“I told her there wasn’t a fire and apologised, which I always do when the alarm activates accidentally.

“She was hysterical and I was drunk on a bottle of wine so we had an argument at the top of the landing outside my door and I called her ‘a Spanish slag’ and told her to go away if she didn’t like it.

“I also stuck my fingers up at her because I just wanted her to stop screaming outside my door. She then called the local police and accused me of hate crime.”

While she accepted she should not have shouted at her neighbour, Ms Madden added: “Ultimately I’m not her mother and I didn’t realise it was illegal to call someone a ‘Spanish whore’”.

‘Drunk entire bottle of rosé by accident’ 

Ms Madden was suspended from the HCPC for nine months in March 2022 by a panel which described her behaviour as “outrageous”.

Her suspension was then extended further by three review panels before a final hearing.

She previously blamed her neighbour for “initiating” the argument and claimed she had “drunk an entire bottle of cheap rosé by accident while I was cooking soup and baking bread”.

Addressing this misconduct hearing in person, Ms Madden told them she had completed 13 courses, one of which was anger management, diversity and safeguarding.

Having reflected on the incident, she claimed she was experiencing a “perfect storm” of challenging circumstances at the time – the Covid-19 pandemic and living in a shared house and health conditions – but admitted she had “completely mishandled” things.

She said she had not realised that the slur was racist at the time, and that somebody at her workplace had “dared” her to use it towards her neighbour.

‘Fundamentally incompatible with being a registered professional’

Ms Madden, who said she feels “deeply ashamed of her conduct”, insisted: “I know that I’m not a racist.”

However, the most recent panel concluded: “There has been no evidence of real change since the final hearing in March 2022, or any evidence that the concerns underpinning her impaired fitness to practise have been overcome.

“It was not clear from her evidence that there has been any material change of position, or a proper appreciation and understanding of the gravity of her actions.

“Although she has expressed her remorse for, and accepted, her wrongdoing, the panel was concerned about the reason given as to why she had made the racial slur – that it was a ‘dare’ from colleagues at work.”

They ruled that members of the public would be “concerned” if professionals such as Ms Madden “were able to practise without restriction”.

It added that her efforts to carry out suggestions from other hearings had been “woeful” and that the progress made by her since the last hearing was “negligible”.

The panel ruled that this lack of engagement and remediation over a two-year period was “fundamentally incompatible with being a registered professional”.

It concluded that the “only sanction that would adequately protect the public and serve the public interest” was one of a striking-off order.