The AP reports from BELFAST, Northern Ireland:

A British news photographer was shot in the leg as hundreds of masked youths hurled bricks, bottles and gasoline bombs during a second night of sectarian violence at a Catholic-Protestant flashpoint in Belfast.

The Press Association agency said Wednesday that the photographer suffered a leg injury and was in stable condition at Royal Victoria Hospital. The agency did not release the name of the photographer. Continue reading.

Peter Morrison / AP

Loyalist rioters attack a police vehicle in East Belfast, Northern Ireland, on June 21. Northern Ireland police faced a second night of attacks from rioters in east Belfast Tuesday, where sectarian rioting saw two people shot and homes attacked with gasoline bombs the previous night.

Peter Morrison / AP

Loyalist rioters throw molotov cocktails towards the mainly Catholic Short Strand area of East Belfast on June 21.

Peter Morrison / AP

A police officer looks on as a molotov cocktail lands in East Belfast in the early hours of June 22.

Peter Morrison / AP

A police officer puts a bandage on a press photographer's leg after he was shot by a rioter in East Belfast in the early hours of June 22.

Update, 12.10 PM ET: AP photographer Peter Morrison describes the events of Tuesday night:

It was a chaotic scene last night in east Belfast, where Catholics and Protestants were throwing stones and fire bombs and police were trying to separate them. Police warned me and fellow journalists to be careful — they heard there was a gunman around. A little later, I heard a rustling at the “peace wall” that separates the neighborhood’s two communities, and I saw a hand with a surgical glove fire four shots directly at us. One photographer was hit in the back of the leg. (He’s in stable condition at a hospital now.)

I was worried about my safety during all this, of course — but more afterward than when I was in the thick of it. I was born and raised in Belfast, and as a photographer, I cover this sort of thing quite a lot. The violence tends to spill over in the weeks leading up to July 12, a divisive holiday when tens of thousands of Protestants from the Orange Order brotherhood march across Northern Ireland. That’s what happened last night, and it was pretty intense, and also noisy — a lot of fireworks, dozens of fire bombs, dozens of bricks, bottles and paint bombs. Of course, that’s normally what happens in a riot here.