Trouble broke out during the peaceful stop the city protest when the police tried to bring a police van through a blockaded junction. A protester standing in front of the police van was violently arrested without warning, thrown to the ground and handcuffed. Other protesters coming to her aid were beaten by police batons. In the end eight arrests were made, mainly under the public order act.

Around 500 people had gathered in Cardiff city centre to mark a week of this barbaric and horrific attack on Iraq. Many protesters carried pictures of bodies or injured children. An American flag was hung from a statue and burned, to much jubilation!

At around half past five, in the middle of rush hour, the protest moved to the street. The main thoroughfare in Cardiff was brought completely to a halt and cars were forced to turn back. Traffic chaos spread across the city.

After about an hour the crowd moved on to blockade another key junction in the middle of Cardiff. This seemed to really piss off the police. First they got Stop The War to appeal to the crowd to move away, but the crowd wasn’t prepared to cave in to this sort of bullshit and stayed put.

Then they escalated the whole thing by bringing the police van through the blockade. Having sparked a reaction they used the opportunity to arrest and baton protesters, in particular those who they had already marked down as anarchists or ‘troublemakers’. The suddenness and the violence of the police assault strongly suggests that they had set the whole thing up.

The female protester, in a state of partial undress after the scuffle with police, was forced by two police officers to march back across the city centre with both hands cuffed behind her back. The police denied that this was intended to cause pain and humiliation, and said it was because police vans on the scene were full and this was the quickest route to the nearest available vehicle.

The protest continued until seven o'clock, all in all bringing Cardiff to a standstill for an hour and a half. Eventually the crowd dispersed when the stop the war coalition spokeswoman took the megaphone and announced that the 'protest was over', and everyone should go home. Shame on them.