Disused Tempelhof airport, home to about 800 refugees, descends into chaos as more than 100 police officers called to scene

Hundreds of refugees have been involved in a mass brawl at a Berlin shelter as lunch was being served, with more than 100 police officers called in to restore order.

The fight on Sunday underlines the difficulties Germany faces in handling hundreds of thousands of migrants. Although incidents in such centres are common, the chaos in the shelter at Berlin’s disused Tempelhof airport was more violent than normal.

“There were apparently many hundreds of people involved,” a police spokesman said. An unspecified number of arrests were made.

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Michael Elias, who is in charge of the shelter, said 830 people were housed at the facility and that between 20 and 30 started the disruption. “It’s the simple fact that there are a lot of young men travelling alone here. We withdrew … because the situation simply exploded. It was a complete blow-out,” he said.

Earlier on Sunday morning police were called to another shelter in Berlin, where similar violence forced 500 inhabitants to flee the building. Such scenes feed scepticism among the German public about accepting refugees. Angela Merkel’s popularity has slumped in a sign of the public’s cooling attitude towards the influx of people fleeing conflict in countries such as Syria.

Earlier this year, the German police union and women’s rights groups accused the authorities of playing down reports of sexual assault and even rape at refugee shelters because they feared a backlash against asylum seekers. Interior minister Thomas de Maizière has called on Germans to avoid succumbing to blanket suspicion of migrants, hundreds of thousands of whom have fled to Europe this year.