In Limassol, police arrested 20 people involved in a rampage over the weekend that left shops belonging to migrants in the city smashed and Asian delivery drivers assaulted. The violence started on Friday night and continued into the early hours of Sunday, the Reuters news agency reports.

It followed similar anti-migrant violence last weekend in Chloraka (also known as Chlorakas) in the west of Cyprus. Twenty-two people were arrested over those incidents.

On Friday night (September 1) about 500 people vandalized shops and businesses as some, wearing hoods, repeated abusive chants against 'Syrians' and 'Blacks' and carried a banner that read "Refugees not welcome."

During the rioting, three people from southeast Asia were attacked and robbed, according to local media reports. A Vietnamese woman working at a store owned by a Cypriot national told the Cyprus Mail that she had never seen anything like it in five years in the country.

"I don’t know what’s happening to Cyprus," she said.

Those who attacked the store had stolen money from the till, set the shelves on fire and smashed the freezers as well as stealing items, the Cyprus Mail reported.

Another victim who owned a restaurant on the beach promenade described the scene on Saturday morning as "unimaginable."

"I have lived in this country for 14 years and never had a problem with Cypriot people," the Egyptian national told the Cyprus Mail.

"I pay taxes, I do everything right, I don’t cause problems to anyone. Why would they do this?," he said.

'Images of shame'

Social media accounts of witnesses showed that tourists visiting Cyprus were also among the victims, with a group from Kuwait viciously attacked.

Kyriakos Kouros, a senior diplomat, tweeted that he doubted the visitors would ever come back. "It is the first time I have felt so embarrassed about such an incident in our country," he wrote.

"This isn’t the Cyprus I was born, raised, had a family and am getting old in."

An emergency meeting was held in the presidential building on Saturday between ministers and heads of the police, civil defense and fire services.

The Cypriot president, Nikos Christodoulides, condemned the "images of shame" and suggested that criminals who had no connection with the migration situation were responsible for the violence.

Tolerance of xenophobia to blame

The head of a rights group in Cyprus, however, blamed the latest violence on what he said was the government’s history of tolerating anti-migrant and racist behavior.

"We had a government that for ten years (was using) rhetoric that more or less portrayed these people as a real national and ethnic and demographic security threat," Doros Polycarpou, executive director of the Cypriot anti-racism NGO KISA, told Reuters.

"They used the narrative, they created the framework, the demands from the society, but they couldn’t deliver the necessary action," he said.

Also read: Leprince: ‘Sometimes it’s harder here in Cyprus than in Cameroon’

On Saturday hundreds of migrant supporters demonstrated peacefully in Limassol, chanting "smash fascism in Limassol and everywhere," the news agency dpa reported.

Tensions over the number of migrants is rising in Cyprus, where refugees and migrants now make up around 6% of the population, the highest proportion in the European Union. The latest asylum figures, however, show a substantial drop in the number of first-time asylum seekers in Cyprus compared with the same time last year.

The right-wing Elam party has complained that Cyprus neighborhoods have become "ghettoized" by immigrants.

Also read: Cyprus launches social media campaign to counter rise in migration

Accommodation for migrants on the island has long been criticized as inadequate and overcrowded.