Racial violence has erupted for the second straight day in Sydney, with cars smashed and reports of shots fired just hours after Australian Prime Minister John Howard appealed for calm. Witnesses said "chaos" had broken out in a shopping centre at south Sydney's Cronulla beach late Monday, the scene of mob violence on Sunday, with vehicles damaged and police making arrests as gangs of men roamed the streets.
"People are standing around in shock, just watching," said a reporter for local radio station 2GB. "Every window in some cars has been smashed. Roads have been blocked (by police)."
One resident, who did not want to be named, told the Australian Associated Press that about 50 cars had swept into the area, disgorging men of Middle Eastern appearance who began trashing every car in sight with baseball bats.
Reporters said gunshots had been heard near a hotel in Cronulla, but police could not confirm reports that a person had been shot.
The hotel is located opposite North Cronulla beach, the scene of violent attacks Sunday by mobs of local whites targeting men of Middle Eastern appearance.
In the mainly Muslim suburb of Lakemba, about 500 young people blocked roads near the local mosque after evening prayers, believing an attack was imminent. They later dispersed, some hurling rocks at police.
More than 30 people were injured and 16 were arrested in some of the worst racial violence in Australian history as riots spread from Cronulla on Sunday afternoon to neighbouring suburbs overnight.
Howard earlier condemned the violence and called for ethnic tolerance.
"Attacking people on the basis of their race, their appearance, their ethnicity, is totally unacceptable and should be repudiated by all Australians irrespective of their own background and their politics," Howard said.
He dismissed any suggestion his government's recent warnings about the possibility of attacks by home-grown Islamic terrorists had fuelled the rampage.
"It is impossible to know how individuals react but everything this government's said about home-grown terrorism has been totally justified," he said, an apparent reference to the arrests last month of 18 Muslim men on terrorism charges.
New South Wales state Police Minister Carl Scully said white supremacists and neo-Nazis were among those involved in the attacks.
"There appears to be an element of white supremacists and they really have no place in mainstream Australian society, those sort of characters belong in 1930s Berlin," he said.
More than 5,000 people gathered at Cronulla beach Sunday after e-mail and mobile phone messages called on local residents to beat-up "Lebs and wogs" -- racial slurs for people of Lebanese and Middle Eastern origin.
The move followed assaults a week ago on two white volunteer lifeguards at the beach, which is a popular gathering place for Muslims from inner-city suburbs, and allegations that local women were being harassed.
One Muslim woman had her headscarf ripped off and was chased into a beach kiosk, local media reported. Six police officers were injured as they tried to quell the violence, and two ambulance officers were also hurt.
A local member of parliament for Howard's Liberal Party, Bruce Baird, said he believed the beach rioting was partly fuelled by the 2002 and 2005 Bali bombings by Islamic militants in which scores of Australians were killed.
The president of the Islamic Friendship Association of Australia, Keysar Trad, told AFP he disagreed with Baird's view that terrorism was the issue.
"This was just an ugly racist genie that was let out of the bottle and we have to put it back in the bottle," he said.
Australia's Muslim community is some 300,000-strong, out of the total population of 20 million.
Australian Arabic Council chairman Roland Jabbour said: "Arab Australians have had to cope with vilification, racism, abuse and fear of a racial backlash for a number of years, but these riots will take that fear to a new level."
