By DPA
Berlin : India’s Ambassador in Germany Meera Shankar voiced concern Tuesday at the mob attack which left eight of her countrymen injured in the eastern German town of Muegeln.
Shankar said an Indian diplomat was being sent to the town in Saxony to speak to the victims and discuss the security situation with officials in the area.
“It has be ensured that there is no repetition of such a thing,” she told the Tagespiegel newspaper, calling on police to conduct a thorough investigation into the attack.
This was in the interests of Indo-German relations, said Shankar, adding that trust was an important part of economic and trade relations between the two nations.
Shankar, who became India’s first woman ambassador to Germany in late 2005, said she would also be getting in touch with the German foreign ministry and the interior ministry.
Police stepped up their presence in Muegeln Tuesday and continued questioning potential witnesses in a bid to track down those involved in Saturday night’s attack at a town festival.
Following a scuffle in a beer tent, a band of about 50 German youths chased the Indians across the town square, shouting “foreigners out”, as local residents looked on impassively.
When the Indians sought shelter in an Indian-owned pizzeria, the mob kicked down the doors and vandalised the owner’s car before police arrived and dispersed the attackers.
The Indians, one of whom has lived in the town for five years, suffered facial cuts and severe bruising in the attack, which experts said was racially motivated.
Former German ambassador to New Delhi Hans-Georg Wieck, chairman of the German-Indian Society, condemned the attack and called for those responsible to be punished.
“I was astonished to hear of the attack. I could not imagine that Germans would resort to violence against Indians. Indians have been living in Germany for decades,” said Wieck.
There are some 45,000 Indians in Germany. Many were educated here and have settled down and started families, said Wieck. Relations with Germans at communal level were good, he added.
The assault revived the debate about right-wing extremism in Germany, particularly the eastern states which were reunified with West Germany in 1990.
“People with dark skin have a much higher risk of being attacked in east Germany than they do in west Germany,” said Sebastian Edathy, a member of the German parliament’s internal affairs committee.
Saxony is a stronghold of the extreme right-wing National Democratic Party (NPD), which polled nine percent in a state election in 2004 and now sits in the state parliament in Dresden.
Two men aged 21 and 23 were detained in the aftermath of Saturday’s melee, but set free by police, who apparently took an hour to appear on the scene despite being alerted of possible trouble.