Jewish restaurant attacked amid German protests
BERLIN: Masked assailants hurled rocks and bottles at a Jewish restaurant, injuring the owner, in an apparently anti-semitic attack on the sidelines of a wave of neoNazi protest in an east German city, authorities and reports said Saturday.
A spokesman for the regional interior ministry said “a politically-motivated act with an anti-semitic background was the most plausible” explanation for the attack in Chemnitz, late last month.
The city has been convulsed by violent far-right, antiimmigration demonstrations since the killing of a German man, allegedly by asylumseekers, on the last weekend of August.
Police in Saxony confirmed to the newspaper Die Welt that they had received a complaint of the attack on the “Schalom” restaurant on the sidelines of the demonstrations.
A mob of around a dozen people, wearing black with their faces covered hurled rocks, bottles and a metal pipe at the restaurant on Aug 27, according to reports in Die Welt and the Freie Presse newspaper.
Owner Uwe Dziuballa suffered an injury to the shoulder during the attack, the reports said.
The restaurant, which was opened in 2000, has been attacked several times before.
The Chemnitz knife attack is the latest in a series of violent crimes by refugees that have garnered massive media attention and stoked anger at German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to allow in more than one million migrants and refugees since 2015.
Far-right groups and thousands of local citizens have taken to the streets since the stabbing, with some seen flashing the illegal Nazi salute.