More than 300 arrested, no less than 15 police officers injured, attacks with pyrotechnics, blank weapons and Molotov cocktails against officers, firefighters and paramedics in their ambulances, burning barricades, a police patrol destroyed with a giant firecracker and, despite everything, satisfaction between the security and rescue forces in Berlin because the serious disturbances of twelve months ago did not occur during New Year's Eve and the beginning of the new year and the situation remained under a certain control. Ambushes like those last year against firefighters and ambulances, which in Berlin are the same service, always act in coordination and share the emergency stations, were avoided, thanks also to the fact that all their exits had police protection.
Some 5,000 agents, 3,500 of them arriving as reinforcements from other federal states, were in charge of ensuring security in the German capital last night. “We are satisfied with our performance, we have managed to protect the firefighters,” a police spokesperson said on Monday morning, while the city-state's Interior Senator, Iris Spranger, stated that “99.9% of the people” celebrated the night peacefully and stressed that not a single firefighter or medic was injured. The fire brigade spokesperson stressed that it was a “normal San Silvestre night” and that there were no serious cases in the rescue missions. And in the first hours of the year they had more than 1,600 departures, which kept more than 1,500 health workers and firefighters busy with their 420 vehicles.
However, while some 65,000 people participated peacefully and without incident in a large popular festival with live music and the first large fireworks in Berlin since the coronavirus pandemic between the Brandenburg Gate and the Victory Column on 17th Avenue June, in the central Alexanderplatz, where the use of pyrotechnics had been prohibited, hundreds of young people participated in a pitched battle in which rockets were fired between the different groups. In that place the first arrests took place and the suspects were immediately brought to justice before midnight. A special team of prosecutors stood guard all night to open a case against every detainee before being taken to cells.
Without regard
In the Lichtenrade neighborhood, groups of young people “shot fireworks at everything that moved,” the police said on X, the old Twitter, and in Neukölln, where a good part of the migrant population of Arab and Turkish origin is concentrated. The police acted ruthlessly. An announced and prohibited anti-Semitic protest was immediately dissolved and firefighters, protected by police, extinguished the barricades that had been set up and set on fire by groups of young rioters, many of whom were arrested. Among nine other young people who were caught red-handed when they filled bottles with gasoline to prepare Molotov cocktails. In that same neighborhood, firefighters had to put out a fire in a nursing home that had broken out after a rocket entered through one of its windows. There were no victims and the damage was minor, but the elderly were scared to death and had to be evacuated preventively, although they were able to return to their rooms hours later.
Meanwhile, in the city of Cologne, where there was also a large preventive police deployment last night, three new arrests were made on Sunday related to the alleged plans for a jihadist attack against the city's cathedral, which has been heavily guarded since ten days ago and closed to tourist visits. On December 26, a 30-year-old Tajik man was arrested on suspicion of preparing an attack against the temple, one of the largest in the world in Gothic style and which houses the relics of the Three Wise Men. The last three detainees would have a direct relationship with that suspect, reported the police, who highlighted that all of them are of Central Asian origin and would be part of an international terrorist network with connections in other European countries.
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