Black Lives Matter protesters block roads in British cities

Associated Press

LONDON

Activists linked to the U.S.-based group Black Lives Matter blocked a road Friday leading to London’s Heathrow Airport and had protests in other British cities.

Organizer Joshua Virasami told the BBC that the movement – founded to protest the killings of black people by American police – was needed “in Britain and all over the world.”

U.K. Black Lives Matter said in a statement it was having a “shutdown” of roads in London and other cities to “mourn those who have died in custody and to protest the ongoing racist violence of the police, border enforcement, structural inequalities and the everyday indignity of street racism.”

London’s Metropolitan Police said officers arrested 10 people blocking a road leading from a main highway to Heathrow on Friday morning, including six who were “locked” to one another.

Photos showed police moving a group of people attached together lying across the road beside a banner saying “this is a crisis.”

In other protests, a small group of demonstrators in the central England city of Nottingham disrupted public transport by lying down on tram tracks, and police removed protesters from a road near Birmingham Airport, 100 miles north of London.