By DPA
Muegeln (Germany) : Police Monday stepped up their search for members of a mob that beat up a group of Indians in an apparently racially motivated attack in Germany.
Police appealed for witnesses to come forward after eight Indians were injured in the incident, which occurred late Saturday at a festival in Muegeln, a town in the eastern state of Saxony.
“We need to establish the exact chain of events and gather further information on those responsible for the attack,” a police spokeswoman said.
Some locals said that rightwing radicals had announced in advance they planned to come to the festival, an indication that trouble was to be expected.
After a scuffle broke out around midnight in a festival tent, a group of about 50 mostly young Germans chased the Indians across the town square, forcing them to take refuge in an Indian-owned pizzeria.
The doors of the restaurant were kicked in by the mob, who also vandalized the owner’s car before police arrived and dispersed them.
A large crowd reportedly witnessed the violence, which also resulted injuries to two police officers and two other people. One of the injured Indians was still in hospital Monday.
Two Germans aged 21 and 23 were detained after the attack, but later released.
A 15-member police task force was set up to investigate the incident and track down those responsible for the violence.
People arrested could face charges of assault, causing malicious damage and breach of peace.
Saxony state police chief Bernd Merbitz told DPA that a “xenophobic motive” could have been a factor in the violence but Muegeln Mayor Gotthard Deuse sought to play down the racial aspect.
“There is no rightwing scene here,” he said. If the incident had a racially motivated background, then the assailants must have come from neighbouring areas, he added.
One of the victims, Singh Gorvinda, said he had never encountered any racial hostility before in Muegeln. The 26-year-old’s friend, Kulvir Singh, said that he, too, had not been harassed in the five months he had lived there.
The two suffered facial bruising and cuts from flying glass.
The Indians had been invited to the festival by Mayor Deuse, who is a personal friend of the Indian pizzeria owner. The men operated clothes stalls at the town’s weekly market.
Muegeln, which has a population of around 5,000, is located about 45 km east of Leipzig and 50 km west of Dresden, Saxony’s two largest cities.
Saxony is one of the states formerly part of communist East Germany, which have seen disproportionate rates of violence against foreigners since German reunification in 1990.
Local citizens’ groups claimed there was “a strategy of silence” among the authorities when it came to rightwing tendencies in the state and appealed to the state government to stress the dangers emanating from rightwing extremism.
Saxony state Premier Georg Milbradt, a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats, visited the town Monday evening for a first-hand look at the situation.