Attacks against Germany's refugee homes on the rise
July 23, 2015
According to a statement from Germany's Interior Ministry on Thursday, there have been more attacks on homes for asylum seekers in the first half of 2015 than in the entirety of 2014.
The ministry recorded 202 attacks from January to the end of June, compared to the 198 incidents over the twelve months before that. It is a worrying trend, as 2014's numbers were themselves a threefold increase on the amount of attacks in 2013.
85 percent of this year's attacks were attributed to perpetrators with anti-immigrant right-wing sympathies. Although the ministry clarified that an increasingly number of incidents were caused by people with no direct links to neo-Nazi circles, and the perpetrators of 26 of the attacks remained unknown.
The top four states experiencing right-wing violence last year were all in the former east, with Brandenburg at the top, experiencing 2.98 violent acts per 100,000 residents. Following Brandenburg was Berlin with 2.81, then Thuringia at 2.27 and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern with 2.19.
The state that saw the highest increase in violence incidents, however, was the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia, where right-wing attacks nearly doubled from 1.09 per 100,000 residents in 2013 to 2.11 in 2014.
es/bw (dpa, EPD)