About 150 asylum seekers have confronted police officers in a small German town to prevent the deportation of a Togolese man. Authorities said, due to exceptional circumstances, they had no option but to release the man.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/S. Puchner
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A refugee, who was due to be deported by authorities in the German state of Baden-Württemberg, has disappeared, after about 150 asylum seekers attacked two police patrol cars that had been ordered to remove him, police admitted on Wednesday.
The incident took place in the town of Ellwangen, between Nuremburg and Stuttgart, early on Monday morning.
Four officers arrived at a migrant reception center in the town to collect the 23-year-old Togolese man, officials said.
The refugee group then started attacking the patrol vehicles, and harassed and punched the officers, before giving them an ultimatum to free the man.
"They were very aggressive and ordered us to leave the man (...) behind," said one officer who was involved in the fracas.
Due to the seriousness of the threat, police at the scene said they ordered a security guard to find the key to unlock the asylum seeker's handcuffs. He then fled the scene.
Although about 20 officers and officials were eventually involved in the standoff, police said they had no time to call in additional back up from other police forces.
The incident was immediately seized upon by the regional leader of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, Bernd Gögel, who described it as a case of the state being "blackmailable."
Other politicians demanded that those behind the attack be found and punished, including Uli Sckerl, a Green party spokesman in Baden-Württemberg's state parliament.
"Attacks on police officers are unacceptable," he said. "In a constitutional state, such conduct must have criminal consequences. It's clear that frustration is no excuse for crime."
The officers' actions were praised by Bernhard Weber, Vice President of the Aalen Police Headquarters, who told the German news agency DPA that although the attack justified a violent response from police, the officers "kept a cool head."
Another Police spokesman Bernhard Kohn, told the online edition of Germany's Focus magazine that officers "face a question of proportionality."
"Just to carry out a deportation, a violent confrontation with such a large crowd would not have ended well."
German daily Die Welt cited government figures that revealed how Baden-Württemberg had witnessed the largest increase in refugees convicted of crimes being deported directly from prison last year. Some 488 prisoners from the state were repatriated after serving their sentences.
Deportations from Germany to Afghanistan
Mid-December 2016 saw the first collective deportation of 34 rejected Afghan asylum seekers from Germany to Kabul – the first of many. Germany halted the flights in late May 2017, but has now restarted them.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/M. Balk
By the planeload
On September 12, 2017, a flight left Germany's Düsseldorf airport for Afghanistan, carrying 15 rejected asylum seekers in what is the first group deportation to the country since a deadly car bomb blast near the German embassy in Kabul in late May. The opposition Greens and Left party slammed the resumption of deportations to Afghanistan as "cynical."
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/B. Roessler
Fighting for a chance
In March 2017, high school students in Cottbus made headlines with a campaign to save three Afghan classmates from deportation. They demonstrated, collected signatures for a petition and raised money for an attorney to contest the teens' asylum rejections - safe in the knowledge that their friends, among them Wali (above), can not be deported as long as proceedings continue.
Image: DW/S.Petersmann
'Kabul is not safe'
"Headed toward deadly peril," this sign reads at a demonstration in Munich airport in February. Protesters often show up at German airports where the deportations take place. Several collective deportations left Germany in December 2016, and between January and May 2017. Protesters believe that Afghanistan is too dangerous for refugees to return.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/M. Balk
From Würzburg to Kabul
Badam Haidari, in his mid-30s, spent seven years in Germany before he was deported to Afghanistan in January 2017. He had previously worked for USAID in Afghanistan and fled the Taliban, whom he still fears years later – hoping that he will be able to return to Germany after all.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/C.F. Röhrs
Persecuted minorities
In January of the same year, officials deported Afghan Hindu Samir Narang from Hamburg, where he had lived with his family for four years. Afghanistan, the young man told German public radio, "is not safe." Minorities from Afghanistan who return because asylum is denied face religious persecution in the Muslim country. Deportation to Afghanistan is "life-threatening" to Samir, says change.org.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/H. Wiedl
Reluctant returnees
Rejected asylum seekers deported from Germany to Kabul, with 20 euros in their pockets from the German authorities to tide them over at the start, can turn to the International Organization for Migration (IOM) for assistance. Funded by the German Foreign Office, members of the IPSO international psychosocial organization counsel the returnees.
