Police admit failure to halt fighting

A POLICE force admitted yesterday that it did not have enough officers available to halt more than three hours of intermittent fighting and vandalism involving drunken soldiers and fairground workers in Cambridge.

Despite several reports of damage caused by soldiers to caravans and cars owned by fairground staff during the disturbances on the town's Midsummer Common, police said no one had been arrested.

A police spokesman said he was unable to say how many officers had attended or why no arrests had been made, but that about 100 soldiers and fairground employees had been present at the peak of the disturbances.

He said the force routinely devoted extra manpower to the annual fair on the common, normally a trouble-free event, but the extra officers had been withdrawn after it ended as normal on Monday night. 'We had no advance intelligence that there was likely to be any trouble . . . we simply did not have the numbers available to deal with the disturbances.'

Yesterday, Cambridge detectives and military police began to investigate the incidents by interviewing soldiers at three army barracks around the town and fairground workers on the site. The inquiries are likely to be hampered by the departure to Belize yesterday of several soldiers and the removal of the fair.

Police said the disturbances appear to have been linked to a fight between fairground workers and soldiers in a public house on Saturday night. On Tuesday night, fighting broke out between two groups of soldiers in a pub before moving on to the common where soldiers and fairground workers were involved in 'intermittent skirmishes' until 3am.