Washington : Baltimore police have enforced a curfew for a third night, as new reports emerged over how the black man at the center of the latest US racial unrest sustained fatal injuries while in police custody.
Fresh protests had broken out in Baltimore and Philadelphia earlier over the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray – the latest household name in the national debate over whether American police are too quick to use violence against blacks, especially young men. As a 10:00 pm curfew began in Baltimore, officers formed a cordon and engaged in a brief but mostly non-violent confrontation with a handful of protesters. Afterwards, calm was restored and the streets were largely vacated.
The demonstrations echo protests that erupted in a St Louis suburb last year when a white policeman shot dead an unarmed black teenager, and then flared again in major US cities when a grand jury declined to indict the officer. On Thursday around 600 people marched in Baltimore that has witnessed some of its worst unrest in decades. But there was no immediate return to the scenes that made worldwide headlines on Monday when violence and looting shook the city following Gray’s funeral. Gray died with 80 per cent of his spine severed at the neck, lawyers for his family say, portraying him as just the latest young African American to die at the hands of the police in the United States. The circumstances surrounding his April 12 arrest and how he sustained the injuries that killed him a week later remain murky and the subject of intense speculation.
