Nearly twenty Berlin police were said to have been brutally attacked by far-left Antifa extremists during a demonstration in one of the city’s strongholds for leftist extremism.
The unidentified Antifa members attacked police in the Friedrichshain area, throwing heavy paving stones at the officers along with bottles and other projectiles, with a total of 19 officers injured during the rioting, Focus reports.
The demonstration, which was against the removal of far-left activists from properties, such as the infamous Rigaer 94 building which they continue to occupy, began in the early evening in Kreuzberg and Neukölln and eventually ended up in Friedrichshain.
According to German tabloid Bild, many of the extremists were allowed to withdraw back into the Rigaer 94 building with the police told not to pursue them due to a policy of “de-escalation” by the leftist-controlled Berlin senate.
The rioters, some of them dressed in the typical black bloc style regularly used by Antifa, attacked a construction trailer at one point during the rioting with the two security guards of the site trapped inside. One of the guards said after the attacks that he “ran for his life.”
The attack on a construction site comes after several similar attacks over the last month or so in the city of Leipzig by other Antifa extremists, including fires set at one site last month that resulted in 10 million euros worth of damages.
Antifa members also invaded the apartment of an employee of a real estate company linked to a luxury apartment construction project earlier this week and brutally beat her.
Following the attacks in Leipzig and others in the city of Bautzen, the regional government of Saxony has formed a Special Commission on left-wing extremism (Soko LinX) within the police force as a special branch to tackle left-wing violent crime.
According to government statistics, there were a total of 222 left-wing motivated crimes in Saxony in 2018, a number that has dramatically increased to 305 so far this year.
As far back as 2017, Bern Palenda, head of the Berlin branch of the Agency for the Protection of the Constitution, warned that left-wing extremism was underestimated in Germany, saying leftists perpetrate “well-organized extremist violence and do not shrink from killing people, if necessary.”