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A man who set fire to a bin that was pushed against the door of a hotel housing asylum-seekers has been sent to prison for nine years, the longest sentence handed to those involved in last month’s wave of far-right riots in England.
At a sentencing hearing Friday at Sheffield Crown Court in the north of England, painter and decorator Thomas Birley pleaded guilty to the charge of arson with the intent to endanger life at the Holiday Inn Express hotel in nearby Rotherham.
Judge Jeremy Richardson told Birley, 27, that his case was “unquestionably” one of the most serious of the dozens he has dealt with in the past month in relation to the rioting outside the hotel on Aug. 4. He said he had considered a life sentence.
The court heard how Birley was involved in many of the worst incidents on that Sunday afternoon, including adding wood to the fire in the bin, which had been pushed against an exit, and helping place a further bin on top of the one ablaze.
Birley was also filmed throwing missiles at the police, squaring up to officers while brandishing a police baton and throwing a large bin that crashed into a line of police with riot shields.
He was the first person to be sentenced for arson with intent to endanger life following the 12 hours of violence in Manvers that left 64 police officers, three horses and a dog injured.
The judge heard how 22 staff in the hotel barricaded themselves into the hotel’s panic room with freezers and “thought they were going to burn to death." Eventually, police brought the situation under control and no one in the hotel was injured.
He said he needed to pass an extended sentence due to Birley’s danger to the public, and ordered that when he is eventually released he should be on license for five years.
The unrest in England's towns and cities started after a stabbing rampage at a dance class on Aug. 1 that left three girls dead and many more wounded. False rumors spread online that the suspect in the attack was an asylum-seeker.
Far-right agitators sought to take advantage of the attack by tapping into concerns about the scale of immigration in the U.K., in particular the tens of thousands of migrants arriving in small boats from France across the English Channel.
The violence around the country also saw a library torched, mosques attacked and flares thrown at a statue of wartime leader Winston Churchill.
