Protesters set rubbish trucks alight and threw firecrackers and stones at police in Naples on Thursday as new clashes flared over waste dumps aimed at easing the latest garbage crisis in Italy's third biggest city. Police used teargas overnight to disperse several hundred protesters near a waste treatment centre, and briefly held two people after arresting five others earlier in the week.
Tension rose again during the day, with demonstrators smashing shop windows with clubs and torching at least five garbage trucks in Terzigno and Boscoreale, two towns at the centre of the protests. As in the past, the anger is directed against existing or proposed new dump sites as residents fear contamination by unregulated and toxic waste disposal.
"We are women, we are mothers let us stop those trucks that will bring death to our children," said one woman as police intervened to let the garbage trucks reach the Terzigno site. One policeman was injured in the face during the clashes, Sky Italia said. Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi called an emergency meeting on the crisis in Rome on Friday.
The protests are the latest episode in a chronic scandal over garbage collection in the region which has resurfaced in recent weeks, prompting growing calls for action from Berlusconi's government. "We want to breathe, it's our right!" read one of a series of banners hung in the streets.