An Afghan man who tore pages out of the Koran and threw them in a nearby toilet ended up making a decision that almost cost him his life, as an angry Syrian migrant mob reacted by chasing him through the streets of a refugee area in Suhl, Germany, this week.

In total, over 17 people were injured during the incident, including six police officers and members of the press, according to reports. It remains unknown if the Koran-desecrating man would have survived had there not been a police presence in the immediate area.

After the Afghan man ripped up the Koran and discarded its pages in a nearby toilet, dozens of Syrian refugees began to chase the individual who had purportedly ruined their holy book. It took a team of armed guards to stop the rioting men, who then began pelting the policemen and security officers with rocks and steel weapons, local reports stated.

“The Syrian men, armed with iron rods, bricks and concrete blocks, then they went completely berserk. They smashed doors, windows, police cars chased the journalists and tossed about with furniture and other things,” read a translated report from DKA.

The violence has continued into Tuesday, the Daily Mail UK reports. Migrants “smashed car windows, ransacked buildings and demolished the walls which divide the shelter in the rampage which lasted several hours,” the report stated.

The refugee camp has taken in approximately 1,700 individuals, which is five hundred over what is supposed to be its maximum capacity, local reports said.

In order to try and prevent future hostilities, German officials are planning on dividing migrants by their ethnicity.

Germany expects that about 800,000 migrants will have arrived by the end of the year, quadruple the number in 2014. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has continued to demand that other European nations follow Berlin’s lead in absorbing the hundreds-of-thousands of Middle Eastern migrants that continue to flood into Europe.

“If Europe fails on the question of refugees, if this close link with universal civil rights is broken, then it won’t be the Europe we wished for,” Merkel said in a news conference on Monday. “Europe as a whole must move,” she added.