This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

German police and prosecutors have questioned some of the claims made by a rightwing populist politician who suffered an attack that left him with serious head injuries.

Police say video footage casts doubt on assertions by Frank Magnitz that he was beaten with a wooden instrument by attackers who only stopped assaulting him when two passersby intervened.

Magnitz, 66, the head of Alternative für Deutschland in the city state of Bremen, was hospitalised on Monday evening after being attacked by strangers.

The AfD claimed he had been knocked to the ground with a wooden instrument before being beaten around the head.

Jörg Meuthen, the party’s federal chairman, posted a photograph on Twitter on Tuesday, showing the MP, apparently unconscious, with a deep gash to his head and a bruised face, and calling the attack an “assassination attempt”.

The party praised two plumbers who had helped Magnitz to his feet and called the police, saying they had saved his life by intervening and scaring off the attackers.

But police, who have described the attack as “politically motivated”, said analysis of CCTV footage shows that while Magnitz was knocked to the ground, the person responsible had quickly fled accompanied by two others and there was no evidence that Magnitz had been kicked or beaten while he was lying on the ground. His head injuries, they said, were likely incurred after he hit his head having been knocked down.

“Recordings secured at the scene show two people who approached the 66-year-old from behind, while a third walked some distance behind,” a spokeswoman for Bremen police said. “One of the unknown people hit the man causing him to topple over.” The trio then fled the scene, she added.

The MP suffered a heavy bleeding head wound, but “on the video material that has been watched so far, the use of an attack object cannot be detected”.

Prosecutors have opened an investigation into grievous bodily harm and have appealed for witnesses.

Magnitz gave several interviews from his hospital bed on Tuesday. He told the Berliner Morgenpost that while he “didn’t want to dramatise” the attack, he believed it had been “a politically motivated assassination attempt”. In a subsequent interview with the tabloid Bild, he said while it was unlikely, he would not rule out that he might also have been the victim of a mugging.

He said the last thing he could recall was passing a handyman’s van, after which “everything went dark”. He came round, he said, when someone shook his arm, and asked if he still had his mobile phone and his wallet.

Magnitz said he suspected his attackers might have been participants at a nearby memorial demonstration for an asylum seeker who was killed in police custody in Bremen 14 years ago.

He told the Morgenpost he assumed someone from the demonstration recognised him and decided to follow him.

A spokeswoman for the event’s organisers, the “Initiative to remember Laye-Alama Condé”, accused Magnitz of speculation and of “purposefully wanting to discredit the subject matter of our event”.

The attack has been condemned across the political divide, with Steffen Seibert, the spokesman for Angela Merkel’s government, tweeting that the “brutal attack” should be strongly condemned.

The AfD’s leadership has called the assault a “black day for democracy”, blaming it on constant AfD baiting by political parties and the media.

The party entered the Bundestag for the first time in the autumn of 2017, having secured just under 13% in the national election.