Looters shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’ as they ransacked shops in Stuttgart on Saturday night and most of those arrested came from a ‘migrant background’, it has emerged.
Rioters attacked police with stones and bottles and even targeted paramedics who were trying to help an injured person, officials said after clashes over a drugs arrest escalated into the city’s worst-ever night of rioting.
Police say there was no sign of a political motivation, blaming alcohol and the ‘party scene’ for the outbreak of violence – although some have linked the riots to the anti-police protests in the United States.
Of the 24 people arrested, 12 were foreign nationals while three of the other 12 were German nationals with a migrant background, police announced on Sunday.
Footage verified by German media showed some of the rioters chanting ‘Allahu Akbar’, meaning ‘God is great’ in Arabic, as they ran down a street during the night-time violence. Others shouted ‘all cops are b*****ds’.
Goods lie on the floor after people break into a shop on in Stuttgart on Saturday night in what police have described as the city’s worst-ever night of violence
Footage verified by German media showed some of the rioters chanting ‘Allahu Akbar’ as they ran down a street during the night-time violence
Stuttgart’s deputy police chief Thomas Berger said that the hundreds of young looters had come from the ‘party scene’ and the ‘Saturday night scene’.
In his 30 years as a police officer he had never seen violence like this and ‘there have never been any scenes like this in Stuttgart,’ he said.
Berger said the violence had erupted during a ‘totally normal’ encounter in which police arrested a white German teenager on suspicion of a drugs offence.
Some 200 to 300 people immediately started attacking police and the crowd of rioters eventually grew as high as 500, he said.
The rioters even threw bottles at paramedics who had been called to an ’emergency’ at the scene, he said. German media has described the scenes as a ‘battlefield’.
19 police officers were hurt and the number could yet rise because some of them may not have reported their injuries at the time, it is believed.
Police said 40 shops had been attacked while 12 police vehicles were damaged, some of them so badly that they had to be taken out of service.
The display window of a shop stands smashed following violent clashes with officers in Stuttgart last night
Goods lie on the floor after people broke into a shop on Marienstrasse in Stuttgart during a night of violence on Saturday and early Sunday
Workers repair damage to a display window of a shop following violent clashes between rioters and police that also led to looting the night before
Police chief Franz Lutz told a press conference that ‘at the moment we can rule out a left-wing or indeed any political motivation’ for the violence.
However, the ‘party scene’ which has re-emerged after the lifting of the coronavirus lockdown has recently seen a growing anti-police sentiment in social media posts, he said.
Police forces have been the subject of widespread anger around the world since the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25.
Crowds in Stuttgart threw stones and bottles while smaller groups ran through surrounding streets breaking shop windows, according to officers.
Police said 40 businesses were vandalised and nine of them looted before the violence was finally brought under control at around 4.30am.
‘These are unbelievable scenes which have left me speechless and which I’ve not experienced in my 46 years in the police,’ Lutz said.
‘There was a never-before-seen dimension of open violence against police and massive property damage,’ he said.
‘It is a sad day for Stuttgart and also for the police.’
Stuttgart, the capital of Baden-Württemberg, has a population of more than 600,000
The display window of a shop stands smashed following violent clashes between rioters and police that also led to looting
Footage showed people wearing hoods and masks rushing in and out of broken store fronts. Clothing shops, a jewellers and a phone shop were among those targeted.Forty stores were smashed into, with at least nine of those being looted.
Thomas Strobl, the interior minister of the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg which includes Stuttgart, said the ‘pictures reaching us from America may have led to a certain aggression’.
Speaking to regional broadcaster SWR, he said authorities would respond with ‘everything that the rule of law provides us with’ to track down and punish the rioters.
Hans-Jürgen Kirstein, the head of a police union, told Bild that ‘young people with a migration background were at the front of the riots’.
The foreign nationals arrested included suspected rioters from Bosnia, Portugal, Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan.
German police and media have increasingly tended to state a suspect’s nationality after a controversy over New Year’s Eve attacks on women in Cologne in 2015, when it was not initially revealed that some of the suspects were asylum seekers.
Stuttgart mayor Fritz Kuhn, a member of the Green party, called the attacks on police ‘unacceptable’.
He said that more people were on the street on Saturday night because many clubs and discos remained closed because of coronavirus.
‘One cause was likely alcohol, another the addiction to social media film clips,’ Kuhn said.
Video taken on mobile phones circulated widely on social media, with police asking witnesses to upload footage that could assist their investigation.