OR British police announced on Tuesday that it had arrested more than 1,000 people allegedly involved in the riots that swept the United Kingdom the last two weeks.

“Police forces across the country have now made over 1,000 arrests linked to the recent violent riots,” the National Police Chief’s Council (NPCC) reported via X.

Charges were brought against 575 of them and successive trials of alleged rioters have begun.

The incidents, the worst in the UK since 2011, broke out in dozens of towns and villages in England and Northern Ireland, sparked by a knife attack that claimed the lives of three girls on July 29.

Rumors about the suspect — initially presented, falsely, as a Muslim asylum seeker — went viral after it was spread by the far-right on social media sites, sparking an outpouring of xenophobic and racist violence in the streets as early as the day after the attack. Many people have also been arrested for posting openly hate speech on social networking sites.

The British judiciary is trying one accused after another and imposing heavy sentences, while the situation seems to have calmed down somewhat since the weekend, after the government announced that the troublemakers will be severely punished.

Among the people who went on trial yesterday was a 13-year-old girl who admitted making threats of violence outside an asylum seeker’s shelter in Aldershot (south).

Another defendant, John Hani, confessed to being an accomplice in an attack on a car in which three Romanians were riding, to attacking police officers during riots in Hall (north-east England) and to having committed theft by taking part in looting shops.