More than 200 people have been arrested following clashes between police and masked protesters at an anticorruption demonstration in the Philippine capital, Manila.
In a statement on Monday morning, the regional police said while most rallies the day before were peaceful, the gathering in Ayala Bridge and Mendiola “even though unprovoked, turned very violent”.
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“Protesters turned mobs assaulted police officers with stones and anything they could get their hands on. Not satisfied with harming police officers in uniform, violent protesters set motorcycles on fire, vandalised and ransacked a business establishment,” the statement read.
It added that police arrested 224 suspects, some of whom were minors.
At least 131 officers were wounded in the clashes, some of whom were “very serious”, but are now receiving medical treatment.
Reporting from Manila, Al Jazeera’s Barnaby Lo explained that while some sense of normalcy returned to the streets of Manila on Monday morning, “there is a heavier police presence than usual”.
“Schools are closed, a curfew for minors has been imposed as investigations into alleged corruption in flood control projects continue, more protests are expected, and at this point they could be unpredictable,” Lo said.
On Sunday, thousands attended rallies in Manila over a corruption scandal linked to ghost flood control projects that cost taxpayers billions of dollars.
While the protest was mainly peaceful, with more than 33,000 rallying in a historic park and a democracy monument in Manila, some took a different route.
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Police said they used tear gas to disperse those who sprayed graffiti on walls, toppled steel posts, shattered glass panels and ransacked the lobby of a budget inn along a popular road.
Regional police spokesperson Major Hazel Asilo told the AFP news agency that none of those arrested has so far shared their reasoning or if “somebody paid them to do it”.
“As soon as we know their affiliations, we can know if they were part of the protesters or if they were just causing trouble,” Asilo added.
Earlier, protests erupted in other Asian countries, including Indonesia and Nepal, in recent weeks over government conduct and corruption.
For Filipinos, anger in the country had been mounting since July after President Ferdinand Marcos Jr uncovered the ghost infrastructure projects during a state-of-the-nation address.
“I feel bad that we wallow in poverty and we lose our homes, our lives and our future while they rake in a big fortune from our taxes that pay for their luxury cars, foreign trips and bigger corporate transactions,” student activist Althea Trinidad told The Associated Press news agency.
According to the Department of Finance, the Philippine economy is estimated to have lost up to 118.5 billion pesos ($2bn) from 2023 to 2025 due to corruption in flood control projects.
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