Sivaharan Kandigh, 39, sat in his old Mercedez Benz van outside the shell of his shop on Clarence Road in the London borough of Hackney on Tuesday morning, his eyes glazed over with disbelief. He fled the conflict in Sri Lanka 11 years ago and set up a small newspaper shop in London which ,over the years, with hard work and the help of family, had grown into a mini-supermarket.

“It was the shop for the community; if you lived here this is the shop you'd come to,” says Jason, 35, who lives on the street.

Now the refrigerated aisles that once held dairy and fresh products are bare and shelves are empty. All that is left are a few cartons of Twinings tea.

“They took everything, even the (surveillance) cameras,” says Kandigh as he stares into space. He had closed shop early afternoon on Tuesday, following warnings from the police about potential violence —violence that had been spreading across the country since Saturday.

But the metal shutters he pulled down proved no hindrance to the mob that attacked his shop that evening. Later that evening, he watched on Sky News the devastation of his shop. “I know everyone on this street. Who would do this,” he wonders. The confusion and mixed emotions among the sizeable crowd that had gathered outside his shop following the third night of violence and looting in London was palpable. Anger, disbelief, and confusion reigned as racial, class, cultural and even neighbourhood tensions swirled and the violence spread to other cities across the country, from Manchester to Birmingham.

“I can tell you one thing: it wasn't the local gangs that did this. They knew these shops. They used to hang out on this street just there,” says an angry resident, pointing across the road from the wrecked shop. “These are people coming from elsewhere… troublemakers. It's mob rule,” he added.

Kandigh speculated whether it was because he was the lone Asian on the street that he had been targeted. (Not a single other shop was touched on the street. All other attacks on Hackney's banks, department stores and cheap clothing stores happened on the main shopping street, a couple of hundred metres away).

While some people embraced Kandigh and pledged him all the help they could provide, others silently swept up ash: the remnants of two cars that had been burned to shells.

Still others muttered under their breath about those who had come to clean up the streets —largely white, middle class people who had coordinated on Twitter for the London-wide riot-cleanup campaign.

“They're supposed to be paying people to do this,” shouted one angry man as the clean-up group had headed towards Clarence Street. There were also those that castigated the British media over their portrayal of the riots, seen by many as steeped in racial stereotypes.

“They just show them as black yobs,” was how David, a mixed-race lighting technician who lives on Mare Street, in the heart of Hackney, put it.

Travelling around London, where many shops and banks have been shutting early each day, one encounters suspicion, fear, disbelief.

Passengers on buses look uncomfortably at their fellow travellers: could they be one of the troublemakers? Police vans that zoom by, sirens screaming, are glanced at apprehensively: where are the rioters striking now?

Others mull over stories of friends, or friends of friends, who've been caught up in the troubles: the parents of a one-year-old who fled their home in leafy Croydon as the looting drew closer and closer to their house; a colleague and his housemate who grabbed the first things they could when rioters set fire to their building above a shop in Clapham Junction, a largely middle-class shopping district.

What of the so-called Blitz Spirit — the determination with which Brits proudly proclaim they supported each other through the Second World War bombings and which, according to the tabloid newspapers at least, is still embedded in society? London today seems rather in the grip of disunity, of a breakdown in social consensus so profound that it took 16,000 police officers out on the streets on Wednesday night to contain it.

There are similarities between these riots and the last major ones to strike the British capital back in the 1980s.

As before, street violence and looting followed confrontations with the police: this time the spark was provided by the fatal shooting of Mark Duggan, 29, in Tottenham on August 4.

(On Tuesday, the Independent Police Complaints Commission confirmed that there was no evidence Duggan had used his gun to fire at police officers.)

Racial tensions between the police and low-income, ethnically varied communities seem, once more, to play a role, along with high levels of youth unemployment and the closing down of opportunities for young people.

This time, however, the riots have taken on a distinctly consumerist edge, with some rioters displaying an almost discerning sense of what to loot.

Large LCD televisions and Swarovski jewellery have been carted off, while some looters have been observed trying on shoes and clothes in shops they had broken into. Using mobile phones, including the BlackBerry Messenger service, to coordinate their actions, law-breakers (mainly, but not exclusively, young males) have been zeroing in on areas never before targeted, smashing windows and setting buildings alight.

Public anger at the looters co-exists with disappointment at the way issues — public spending cuts, the economy, racial tensions — are manifesting themselves.

“I'm so sad,” says Deborah, 35, a resident of Clapton, an area not far from Hackney, standing with some 100 people outside Hackney town hall, brooms and black bin liners at the ready to join in the Twitter clean-up operation.

“What's wrong with society that people are so disenfranchised that they do this?”

Once the riots are contained it will take a very long time for Britain to grapple with what went wrong.

Its global image as the next proud host of the Olympic Games has been shattered in the space of a few days; on television and computer screens across the world it shows its lawless, savage face.

Fires light up the night sky, buildings that survived the Blitz attacks of the Second World War are reduced to blackened shells; families find themselves homeless, livelihoods and businesses — the proud, hard-won achievements of people like Sivaharan Kandigh — are destroyed for the sake of a TV set or a bottle of alcohol. It will take even longer for trust within communities to be restored.

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