LONDON — Activists linked to the U.S.-based group ****************** blocked a road Friday leading to London’s Heathrow Airport and held ******** in other British cities.

Organizer Joshua Virasami told the BBC that the movement – founded to ******* the killings of black people by American ****** – was needed “in ******* and all over the *****.”

U.K. ****************** said in a statement it was holding a “shutdown” of roads in London and other cities to “mourn those who have **** in custody and to ******* the ongoing ****** ******** of the ******, border enforcement, structural inequalities and the everyday indignity of street ******.”

London’s Metropolitan ****** says officers made several arrests among those blocking a road leading from a main highway to Heathrow on Friday morning. Photos showed ****** moving a group of people attached together lying across the road.

****** said one lane of the road was open but traffic was backed up getting into one of the *****’s busiest airports. Heathrow said it was not aware of passengers missing flights because of the *******.

In other ********, a small group of demonstrators in the central England city of Nottingham lay down on tram tracks in the city, and ****** removed people from a road near Birmingham Airport, 100 miles (160 kilometres) north of London.

The protesters said they were marking the fifth anniversary of the ***** of Mark Duggan, a 29-year-old black man shot by London ****** under disputed circumstances on Aug. 4, 2011. The ******* sparked *******’s ***** civil disorder in decades, five nights of ******* that spread to cities around the country.

Activists say black men in ******* are unfairly targeted by law enforcement and disproportionately represented among prison inmates. According to official figures, 26 per cent of inmates in England and Wales are non-white, compared to 12 per cent of the overall population there.