By Anne Cadwallader BELFAST (Reuters) - Protestant demonstrators shot at police and pelted them with homemade bombs in Belfast on Saturday in some of the worst rioting seen in Northern Ireland in recent years. Trouble flared after a contentious parade by Orangemen near a nationalist neighbourhood on the edge of west Belfast, and quickly spread to other parts of the city and outlying areas. Heavily armed riot police deployed baton rounds and water cannon after they came under fire from automatic weapons and a rain of blast bombs, petrol bombs and bricks from angry mobs several hundred-strong on west Belfast's Springfield Road and near the flashpoint Short Strand in east Belfast. Cars were hijacked and set alight across the city. Police said six officers had been wounded by blast bomb impacts and several others hurt, but added the number of casualties was likely to rise significantly. Two civilians were also injured, one of them with serious gunshot wounds. "Police officers and soldiers have come under sustained attack -- they have been attacked with missiles, petrol bombs, blast bombs, and pipe bombs. They have been shot at," Northern Ireland Chief Constable Hugh Orde said. He laid the bulk of the blame for the disorder with the Orange Order, who organised the disputed parade. "The Orange Order must bear substantial responsibility for this. They publicly called people on to the streets. I think if you do that you cannot then abdicate responsibility. That is simply not good enough," he said in a statement. ORANGEMEN The Protestant Orangemen and their supporters had been angered by a decision earlier this week by Northern Ireland's independent Parades Commission to re-route their planned march away from a nationalist enclave on the Springfield Road because of objections from residents. Trouble broke out as they approached the contested section of the march, which had been postponed from earlier in the year. Every summer thousands of Orangemen, wearing colourful regalia and playing music, engage in "a marching season" to celebrate the 17th century defeat in battle of Catholic King James II by the Protestant William of Orange. Most Catholics in the province regard the marches as an offensive display of triumphalism. Earlier this week the Orange Order said the decision to re-route Saturday's march was the latest in a series of attempts to "erode Protestant culture" and deny Orangemen their rights, and called on followers to support the parade. Tension has mounted recently in Protestant communities -- which support Northern Ireland's links with Britain -- on the view that the British government has moved too fast to reduce its security presence in the province without any concrete action by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) to disarm. In July the IRA said it was ending its 30-year armed campaign against British rule in Northern Ireland and pledged to dump its weapons, but so far it has shown no sign of doing so.
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