Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte has condemned riots across the country this weekend in which demonstrators attacked police and set fires to protest against a night-time curfew to slow the spread of the coronavirus, calling them “criminal violence”, Reuters reported.

The police said hundreds of people had been detained after incidents that began on Saturday evening and lasted until the early hours of Monday, including some in which rioters threw rocks and in one case knives at police and burned down a Covid-19 testing station.

“This has nothing to do with protest, this is criminal violence and we will treat it as such,” Rutte told reporters outside his office in The Hague. Rutte’s government added the curfew as an additional lockdown measure from Saturday over fears that the British variant of Covid-19 may soon lead to an increase in cases.