Muhammad Khattak and Haroon Khan are assaulted outside house hours after their windows are smashed

This article is more than 6 years old

This article is more than 6 years old

Two Pakistani men subjected to racial violence and abuse in north Belfast have fled their home.

The men moved out of their house in Parkmount Street, close to the loyalist Tigers Bay district, as the leader of the biggest Protestant church in Northern Ireland denounced the upsurge in racist attacks across the region.

The two Pakistani immigrants said that since moving into the house six months ago they had suffered constant racial abuse.

Muhammad Khattak and Haroon Khan were assaulted outside the house on Sunday afternoon hours after their windows were smashed.

Khattak told the Belfast Telegraph that remarks by the first minister, Peter Robinson, that he would not trust a Muslim who adhered to sharia law "cast suspicion over every Muslim" living in Northern Ireland.

Meanwhile the new moderator of the Presbyterian church in Ireland, Dr Michael Barry, said the rise in racist violence was an affront to all of society.

"That is behaviour that must stop immediately. We must never do or say anything that would give the slightest comfort to those who would verbally or physically attack people they do not like.

"We are to treat all people with respect and dignity because they have been created in the image of God," he said.

Barry added that the honorary consul for Poland in Northern Ireland had recently contacted him over his concerns that Polish people and other immigrants were being increasingly targeted by racists in the region.

In a bid to defuse the row engulfing Robinson, his Democratic Unionist party appears to have censured one of its own councillors after she branded the only Chinese-born parliamentarian in the UK as a racist.

Anna Lo, an assembly member for the centrist Alliance party, revealed in the Guardian last week that she intended to quit Northern Ireland politics because of enduring sectarianism and now rising racism.

In response the DUP's deputy mayor of Newtownabbey, Dineen Walker, tweeted that she saw Lo as a racist who was biased against people in Northern Ireland.

Walker was frontrunner to become the next mayor of Newtownabbey but the DUP told its local party in the area to find an alternative candidate.

Instead the DUP nominated Thomas Hogg as its mayoral candidate for the borough, which lies north of Belfast.