By Maren Wittge
Are the police in the capital fair game for a criminal mob? The police union released a photo that became evidence of an extremely brutal New Year’s Eve.
What the picture documents: an official was apparently shot at directly with a blank gun. A man is said to have put the gun under the police officer’s vest and pulled the trigger! He suffered burns and swelling.
Another police officer says: “This New Year’s Eve was a sad climax: I had the feeling that they really want to hurt us badly or even kill us.”
Police officers and firefighters were targeted during operations on New Year’s Eve. In the meantime, the number of injured emergency services has risen to 56! The number of those arrested has increased to 159.
A young man throws a fire extinguisher at the ambulance on Silbersteinstrasse Photo: Nonstop News
The attacks on the emergency services in Neukölln were particularly brutal:
► At Wutzkyallee (Gropiusstadt), patrol car crews were massively attacked with pyrotechnics. One official was hit so badly that a rocket got under his visor. “He suffered severe burns on his neck,” says a police spokesman. Hospital!
► A video shows how a stun gun is shot inside a patrol car.
► During a TV interview with a firefighter, a masked man appears, forming his hands into an Albanian double-headed eagle. Another yells: “We won.” Then the masked man shoots several times in the air.
► On Silbersteinstraße, a fire extinguisher was thrown at an ambulance with an injured patient on board at around 0.20 a.m.! The windshield shattered. A replacement car had to come.
Migration researcher Ahmad Mansour (46) speaks of “young people who reject our rule of law and perceive it as weak”. Politicians do not hold foreign perpetrators responsible, but see everyone as victims per se.
In Neukölln, a police vehicle is shot at with a ball bomb Photo: tiktok/beyza.km
Mansour: “Anyone who attacks the police commits an attack on the rule of law and gambles away their right of residence.”
Interior Senator Iris Spranger (61, SPD) considers 4,000 additional body cameras necessary for the emergency services. The body cameras are necessary to ensure “legally secure criminal prosecution”. So far, 300 devices are in use, 50 of them by the fire brigade.
Federal Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser (52, SPD) wants the penalties for attacks on emergency services, which were tightened in 2017, “to be applied and enforced with all consistency”. This could result in imprisonment of up to 5 years.