After the New Year’s Eve riots in Berlin, the police have meanwhile initiated 102 criminal proceedings for assaults on security and rescue workers. That said the Berlin police chief Barbar Slowik on Monday in the interior committee of the House of Representatives. 49 procedures relate to attacks on police forces, 53 more are carried out because of attacks on fire brigade forces.
According to Slowik, there are a total of 37 suspects in the 49 cases of attacks on police officers, but she did not name the corresponding figures for the cases of attacks on the fire brigade. On Friday, the police also handed over 22 completed procedures with a total of around ten suspects to the public prosecutor for further processing.
The police chief said police investigations into the riots were being carried out “with vigour.” One focus is the evaluation of the “enormous amount of image material” from New Year’s Eve. To quickly identify suspects, the police use, among other things, the expertise of so-called super-recognizers. These are people who remember and recognize faces well above average.
On New Year’s Eve, emergency and rescue services in Berlin and other cities were massively attacked. In some cases, the police had to be deployed to protect firefighters from attacks while they were putting out fires. In the capital alone, 33 emergency services were injured and, according to the police, 145 people were arrested, but they were later released. The violent attacks sparked a wide debate about the consequences.
According to Slowik, citizens have so far made around a hundred data packages with images and videos of the riots available to the police via an information portal. In addition, there is the detailed documentation of the operational hundreds. The Berlin State Criminal Police Office is also specifically looking for videos on the Internet that suspects have uploaded. Even with blurred traces of authorship, it is possible for experts to find clues.
