Longest jail terms for UK disorder handed down as prosecutors pursue riot charges

LONDON (Reuters) - Two men on Friday received the longest jail sentences yet over the recent widespread violent disorder in Britain, as prosecutors charged another man with the more serious offence of rioting and said further charges were likely to follow.

A 48-year-old man was jailed for six years for a number of offences including racially aggravated criminal damage and violent disorder in Hull, northeast England, on Aug. 3.

Judge John Thackray said David Wilkinson had played a leading role in what he described as "12 hours of racist, hate-fuelled mob violence", kicking out and throwing missiles at officers, spitting at them and trying to start a fire.

Another man John Honey, 25, was jailed for 56 months for violent disorder and burglary. Honey was repeatedly seen on film footage of the Hull riot because he had worn a distinctive shirt with the England flag.

He was shown in the footage looting shops and being part of a group which, along with Wilkinson, attacked a car carrying three Romanian men and had tried to drag them from the vehicle.

"You ... were intending to create a high risk of injury to persons because you were doing your best to assist others in exposing the occupants to the wrath of the baying mob," Thackray told them.

The sentences are the longest imposed after days of rioting involving violence, arson and looting as well as racist attacks – the previous longest being three years and four months.

Britain's Crown Prosecution Service on Friday charged a 32-year-old man with the offence of riot, having charged a 15-year-old boy with riot on Thursday.

Riot is a more serious charge than violent disorder and carries a maximum jail term of 10 years.

Gale Gilchrist, Chief Crown Prosecutor for CPS North East, said the 32-year-old was "one of a number of individuals who we expect will be charged with riot".

Police and prosecutors are responding to disorder which followed the killings of three young girls in the northern English town of Southport on July 29, which based on online misinformation were wrongly blamed on an Islamist migrant.

The National Police Chiefs' Council said in its latest update on Friday that, since the trouble that followed the Southport murders, police had a made a total of 1,117 arrests.

(Reporting by Michael Holden and Sam Tobin; Editing by Hugh Lawson)