Germany on knife-edge

Stabbing of Daniel set off attacks against people whom the mob took to be foreigners.

Chemnitz

German police braced for more far-right protests yesterday against Chancellor Angela Merkel’s immigration policies in the eastern city where a fatal stabbing has sparked outbreaks of racist mob violence.

Saxony state police said they would be backed by reinforcements from five other states and federal police, after being heavily outnumbered by thousands of neo-Nazis, football hooligans and other extremists in unrest on Sunday and Monday.

The flashpoint city of Chemnitz, where state premier Michael Kretschmer was to hold a town hall-style meeting on democracy today, has seen a violent outbreak of long-simmering anger against what protesters label “criminal immigrants” since Sunday’s knife killing.

Police have arrested Iraqi Yousif Ibrahim A, 22, and the Syrian Alaa S, 23, for the stabbing of 35-year-old Daniel H, a carpenter – the crime that set off random street attacks against people whom the mob took to be foreigners.

The disturbing scenes, which saw assaults against an Afghan, a Syrian and a Bulgarian man and were described as “pogrom-like” by some observers, have sparked widespread revulsion in Germany and beyond.

In another violent hate crime overnight in the ex-communist east, a 20-year-old migrant was subjected to xenophobic insults, kicked and beaten with a iron chain by three men in the Baltic coast city of Wismar, police said without giving his nationality.

Images of protesters making the illegal Hitler salute in Monday’s protest were “shocking”, said United Nations human rights chief Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, demanding that politicians from all over Europe speak out.

Merkel – travelling in Africa until today, mainly to discuss how to fight the causes of migration to Europe – has condemned the farright protests, declaring there is no place for “hate in the streets” in a liberal democratic state.

Tensions risked being inflamed further by a news report that the Iraqi suspect in the murder case had, despite a lengthy criminal record, somehow avoided deportation.

The trained hairdresser had arrived in Germany in 2015, the peak year of the influx that would bring over one million mostly Muslim people to the European Union’s biggest economy, reported Bild. – AFP