Sinn Fein representatives and Northern Ireland Office minister Des Browne are seeking an end to continuing sectarian violence in Belfast.

The two sides were set to meet on Wednesday following talks earlier this month between Browne and loyalist representatives.

Party chairman Mitchell McLaughlin was leading the Sinn Fein delegation.

The bid to ease tensions comes after another night of disturbances on the streets of the Northern Ireland capital.

On the Shankill Road a petrol bomb was thrown at a passing car, and in the east of the city there were more clashes as rival groups threw fireworks, bottles and stones at each other.

Police said that six officers were injured and two plastic bullets were fired as they attempted to control the violence in the city.

Unionists and republicans blamed each other for the fighting.

Sir Reg Empey, an Ulster Unionist assembly member said Sinn Fein were organising a "campaign against the police" in the east of the city.

"The people who are preventing the police doing their job in there is Sinn Fein and therefore it is all part of the Sinn Fein campaign to undermine the Police Service of Northern Ireland and to prevent the nationalist community backing it," he said.

But Sinn Fein said the loyalist Ulster Defence Association was behind separate attacks in which bullets were fired at houses in a nationalist area.

The government is continuing to warn all sides that there is "no acceptable level of violence" in Ulster.

It hopes that progress can be made in reducing tension at so-called "interfaces" between the two communities.

Without a reduction in violence, the government is likely to come under increasing pressure from unionists to review the validity of all paramilitary ceasefires, including that of the IRA.