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"At Cowlairs, I’ve heard tales of bonfires, cars that have been set ablaze and a group of dirt bike racers who’ve carved out paths that stretch over most of the 74-acre park. It’s this unofficial race track which has brought me up here.
Hamza was manning the till in the St Enoch Square corner shop he works in when the men in balaclavas started pounding on the window. It was around 7.30pm on Tuesday evening and twenty-something Hamza was alone in the shop, with just vapes, sweets and drinks for company.
The Glasgow Bell
My first interaction with the Cowlairs cowboys (actually teenagers) is when two of them on a blue dirt bike come flying over a rise, sunlight behind them, dirt spraying from the back wheel. Both are wearing balaclavas.
“They were banging on the window”, Hamza told us, “and they had metal rings on”. By then, Glasgow had a broad overview of the protest that took the city by surprise on Tuesday, which saw demonstrators respond to calls by far-right figures like Tommy Robinson and Elon Musk.
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Almost on cue, three more boys appear over the hill and the original pair quickly disappear with them. I wait for their return for a bit, before deciding to keep walking. Roughly 20 minutes later, I stumble across something I wasn’t expecting at all.
www.glasgowbell.co.uk/cowlairs-par...
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And The Bell can reveal that two flags bearing white supremacist and neo-Nazi symbols were flown in St Enoch Square.
But as men dressed in black jeered at Hamza — who is visibly South Asian — through the window, he didn’t have any context. He just knew that it was “scary”.
