Each side accuses the other of having raised the tension on the ground on Saturday. Activists opposing the expansion of an open-pit coal mine in Lützerah, western Germany, on Sunday (January 15th) accused police of cracking down with « violence » their demonstration the day before. During the latter, which degenerated into clashes, dozens of police and demonstrators were injured.
Indigo Drau, a spokeswoman for the protest organizers, denounced the « violence pure » which the German police demonstrated on Saturday, during a press conference given on Sunday. She claimed that the police officers had beaten ” without restraint “ climate activists, hitting several of them on the head.
On Saturday, around 15,000 demonstrators according to German police, 35,000 according to organisers, including Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, protested against the extension of an open-pit lignite mine leading to the destruction of the hamlet of Lützerath, located in the Rhine basin, between Düsseldorf and Cologne. The latter had come to support the activists who had occupied the site for two years and whom the police undertook to dislodge this week.
Twenty activists hospitalized and seventy police officers injured
At the end of the day of mobilization marked by violent clashes between police and demonstrators, the collective Lützerath lebt! (“Lützerath lives!”) reported injuries to dozens of activists, some of them serious. Twenty of them were hospitalized, according to Birte Schramm, a nurse from the activist group.
Police said on Sunday that nearly seventy of their officers were injured on Saturday and that legal proceedings were launched against around one hundred and fifty people for resisting police officers, damaging property or disturbing order. audience.
“We were targeted by projectiles, with stones, mud, fireworks”, told Agence France-Presse Andreas Müller, spokesperson for the police. According to the police, several police vehicles were also damaged, in particular by stone throwing or their tires having been punctured. Twelve demonstrators were arrested or taken into custody at the end of the day.
On Sunday, the police also declared that the situation on the ground had returned to ” very calm “ and announced that it had almost finished evacuating the hundreds of climate activists occupying the area, at the end of an operation which began on Wednesday January 11. If the evacuation was initially supposed to last for weeks, there were only two activists left in the village on Sunday evening, holed up in an underground mine, according to the police.