This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

A fire that destroyed a hotel being converted into a shelter for refugees in Saxony was cheered and celebrated by onlookers, German police have said.

The blaze at the building in Bautzen, eastern Saxony, began in the early hours of Sunday morning. Police are treating the incident as suspected arson. No one was injured.

Locals had cheered as the building caught fire, police said. “Some people reacted to the arson with derogatory comments and undisguised joy.”

While the majority of Germans have been welcoming toward refugees, a vocal minority has staged protests in front of refugee homes, especially in the east, and there has been a surge in violence against such lodgings in the past year. Saxony is home to the anti-Islam and anti-immigration group Pegida.

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The fire happened just days after about 100 protesters screamed “We are the people!” and “Go home!”as they blocked a bus carrying asylum seekers to a shelter in Saxony.

Two videos of the incident in Clausnitz emerged on social media on Friday, with one of them showing a police officer dragging a visibly distressed boy from the coach into a nearby building. Police insisted the move was necessary to prevent the situation from escalating.



Saxony’s chief of police, Uwe Reißmann, said the use of “simple direct force” had been absolutely necessary and appropriate to remove three passengers, including a minor, who had refused to leave the vehicle after being asked to do so via an interpreter.

At a press conference in Chemnitz, Reißmann said the refugees were partly to blame for the incident after escalating the situation with provocative gestures, such as showing the middle finger.

“We will certainly extend the investigations to include one or two of the bus’s passengers,” he said, adding that police were already following up 14 charges, including breach of assembly rules and use of duress.

Some German politicians, such as the co-chair of the Green party, Cem Özdemir, have called for the suspension of the officer in charge of police operations during the incident.

“We were scared to get off the bus because we thought the people wanted to kill us or tear us to pieces,” one of the refugees told the newspaper Die Welt. “We wanted to stay inside the bus and return to Chemnitz, where we were beforehand. We were just scared.”

Witness reports describe protesters throwing snowballs at the bus and shouting “Let’s see what kind of vermin will get off here” and “asylum scum”.

According to the Bild am Sonntag newspaper, the boy manhandled by police is a 15-year-old from Lebanon called Luai, who had fled the country with his father and brother. The group of asylum seekers inside the coach also included four Syrians, two Afghans and six Iranians.

The group are the first asylum seekers to be allocated to Clausnitz, a town of about 800 residents.

It emerged that the man in charge of supervising the shelter in the town is a member of the local branch of anti-refugee party Alternative für Deutschland.

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Engineer Thomas Hetze gave a speech in front of the rural district office in November in which he said that while he supported humanitarian aid for people fleeing war zones, “unrestrained invasion by 100,000 of economic migrants” represented “a crime against the German nation”. In his speech Hetze referred to the existence of an “American masterplan” aimed at destabilising North Africa and the Middle East in order to “weaken Europe”.

The governor of Saxony, Stanislaw Tillich, said the two incidents were appalling and shocking, and described the perpetrators as criminals.

“This is abhorrent and disgusting,” he said in an interview with the Funke newspaper group. Tillich pledged that authorities will investigate and “bring everyone responsible to account”.

Germany’s justice minister, Heiko Maas, tweeted that anyone who applauds as buildings burn or who intimidates refugees “acts abominably and abhorrently”.