Thousands of people take to the streets in Berlin at the weekend to protest against the Corona policy, although numerous demonstrations have been banned. Now the police are taking stock of the clashes.
Berlin – After numerous illegal gatherings of opponents of the Corona policy on Sunday in Berlin, the police initiated at least 503 preliminary investigations against participants.
Police said on Monday evening that 59 cases were being investigated for resistance and 43 for assault against law enforcement officers. Further reports were therefore written because of particularly serious breaches of the peace, liberation of prisoners and violations of the Freedom of Assembly Act and the Berlin Infection Protection Ordinance.
Despite a ban on large-scale demonstrations, including so-called “lateral thinkers”, several thousand people marched through the capital on Sunday. They repeatedly gathered in groups in different parts of the city, and there were several clashes between protesters and police forces. More than 60 police officers were injured, some seriously, the police said.
According to the police, the largest unauthorized gathering in the Westend district comprised up to 2,000 participants. An intersection was blocked with a coach. In total, emergency services had to “restrict their freedom or arrest them” at the weekend of almost 1,000 people. More than 60 percent of them came to Berlin from other federal states. Participants in unauthorized gatherings had repeatedly attacked emergency services in various districts, but also those who thought differently and at least one television team.
A 48-year-old died after a provisional arrest at a “lateral thinker” demonstration. According to the attorney general’s office, an autopsy on Monday revealed that he had suffered a heart attack: “There are no indications of external violence that caused death during the arrest.” The investigation into the cause of death has not yet been completed.
Berlin’s Senator for the Interior, Andreas Geisel, rated the police’s action at the actually forbidden gatherings as professional and appropriate. “We can not see that the police were not in control of the situation,” said the SPD politician on Monday the Berlin “Tagespiegel” (online).
Three demonstrations scheduled for Monday were also banned. According to the police, there were no new incidents until the evening. According to the founder of the initiative “lateral thinking 711”, Michael Ballweg, the group registered another rally for August 29th with 22,500 participants in Berlin.
The federal government reacted with concern to the riots in the unauthorized “lateral thinkers” protests. There were also “attacks on people from the protest events,” said the deputy government spokeswoman Ulrike Demmer on Monday. “The federal government perceives this with great concern.”
The Federal Ministry of the Interior announced in April that the Office for the Protection of the Constitution was observing individual actors and parts of the Corona protest movement nationwide using intelligence services. The reason for this is the “constitutional protection-relevant delegitimization of the state” that they pursue.
The Stuttgart group “lateral thinking 711” is regarded as a kind of nucleus of the protest movement that is now active throughout Germany. “A lateral thinker is not a lateral thinker” – the scene is very heterogeneous, emphasized the spokesman for the Federal Ministry of the Interior, Steve Alter. A new form of extremism arose in the pandemic, in which different actors “are united by the goal of destabilizing and delegitimizing the state institutions, the state as such”.
Ballweg, meanwhile, doubted the number of people named by the police who were involved in the protests on Sunday. A police spokesman had spoken of at least 5,000 people on Sunday evening. “In our estimation, there were significantly more,” said Ballweg on Monday. Regarding the behavior of the police on Sunday, he said: “I don’t want to generalize. We saw peaceful officers doing their job, we also saw a lot of police violence. ”The action taken against peaceful demonstrators was very disproportionate. dpa
