From BZ editors
The harmless reason: being sprayed with water guns. The result: Around 100 people hit each other – several injured and a large-scale police operation.
As the police announced on Monday, there was a mass brawl in a summer swimming pool in the Steglitz district on Sunday afternoon. When asked by BILD, the Berlin pool companies said that it was the summer pool on the islander.
According to this, around 4:25 p.m., two groups, consisting of four and ten people, are said to have sprayed each other with water guns for fun. However, the initial fun developed into a verbal and then a physical argument.
When security forces tried to mediate, the situation escalated. In the end, around 100 people were involved in the mass brawl – all recorded in several videos.
The horror especially for families who wanted to spend the hot Sunday having fun in the outdoor pool with their children. When the brawl broke out between the 100 or so young men, children stood in a throng, in the background you can see mothers jumping up and bringing their children to safety.
The police arrived in large numbers and were finally able to calm the heated atmosphere. “The situation only calmed down when a total of 13 radio vehicles and parts of a hundred units arrived on site,” said a police spokesman on Monday.
► Rainer Wendt, head of the German police union: “It is the organizer’s task to carry out identity checks and also to control them and, if necessary, to limit them. You can do that. Any discotheque owner who has a decent bouncer can ensure that such clientele are not allowed in. The police can’t always come. The police are a law enforcement agency, not a lifeguard club. We cannot be present in all swimming pools with hundreds. That is the job of the organizers.”
Bodily harm, breach of the peace, knife attack
Investigations on site initially led to four suspects aged 23, twice 21 and 15 years. The four are now being investigated for particularly serious breaches of the peace.
A 21-year-old is also being investigated for dangerous bodily harm – he is said to have hit a 23-year-old security officer at the swimming pool.
Steglitz-Zehlendorf
The second 21-year-old suspect said he was attacked with a knife and injured by an unknown person. He also said that another person, who remained unknown, was said to have been injured in the shoulder by the same man with a knife. A 10-year-old boy who got into the aggressive group was punched in the head.
“Politicians shy away from the debate about the perpetrator clientele, which we also see quite obviously here. It’s young men, not all, but most with a migration background, who quite obviously claim this public space for themselves,” says Wendt.
