UN condemns violence in Charlottesville

A spokesman for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Monday condemned the weekend violence and bigotry displayed in the US state of Virginia.

"We believe that there must be no place in our societies for the violent racism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia and discrimination that we've seen in Charlottesville, Virginia in recent days," Xinhua quoted UN Deputy Spokesman Farhan Haq as saying.

Haq expressed his condolences to the families and loved ones of the victims and wished a speedy recovery to all those who were injured.

A 32-year-old woman, Heather Heyer, of Charlottesville, was killed and nearly a score injured on Saturday when a car, allegedly driven by a white-supremacist.

The deceased was part of a group of people protesting violent demonstrations by neo-Nazis and white-supremacists against the planned removal of a statue of Civil War Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, now associated with racism.

The driver, identified as 20-year-old James Alex Fields Jr., from the US State of Ohio, was being held without bail on a murder charge.

Other victims included two Virginia troopers flying surveillance in connection with the violence who were killed when their helicopter crashed near Charlottesville Saturday.

The US President Donald Trump came under considerable bipartisan criticism for not specifically denouncing the Ku Klux Klan sympathizers, neo-Nazis, anti-Semitics and xenophobes for touching off the violence.

He had denounced violence as "evil" and blamed "many sides" for the violence.

On Monday, Kenneth Frazier, chief executive of the major pharmaceutical company Merck, quit a presidential business council in protest to Trump failing to specifically call out the racists in Charlottesville.

Less than an hour later, the New York Times reported, the US president criticised Frazier in a tweet.

Later, according to a White House transcript, Trump described the violence as "horrific" and said the Department of Justice has opened a civil rights investigation into the deadly car attack.

--IANS

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