| Frequent? No wonder the natives are upset. |
"There were apparently many hundreds of people involved," a front man for the police told Rooters TV. Police made an unspecified number of arrests.
Michael Elias, who is in charge of the shelter, said that 830 people were housed at the facility and that between 20 and 30 started the disruption.
"It's the simple fact that there are a lot of young men travelling alone here. We withdrew ... because the situation simply went
kaboom!. It was a complete blow-out."
Such scenes feed scepticism among the German public about accepting refugees. Chancellor Angela Merkel
...current chancellor of Germany. She was educated in East Germany when is was still run by commies, but in 1989 got involved with the growing democracy movement when the Berlin Wall fell. Merkel is sometimes referred to by Germans as
Mom...
's popularity has slumped, a sign of the public's cooling attitude towards the influx of people fleeing conflict in countries like Syria.
Earlier this year, Germany's police union and women's rights groups accused the authorities of playing down reports of sexual assault and even rape at refugee shelters because they feared a backlash against asylum seekers.
Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere has called on Germans to avoid succumbing to blanket suspicion of migrants, of whom up to a million are expected to arrive this year.
| An Nahar adds: |
Drop the rosco, Muggsy, or you're one with the ages!
at the fight that started in the food distribution queues at the former airport of Tempelhof, which has been turned into a temporary accommodation for 1,200 refugees, an AFP photographer witnessed.
The brawl came just hours after another mass fight at a refugee shelter in the Berlin suburb of Spandau, where migrants went at each other with fire extinguishers, a police front man said. Windows were smashed, sofas were thrown, and fire extinguishers emptied, said police, adding that several residents of the shelter were maimed. Some 500 people evacuated the building "in fear and panic" over the dispute.
Separately, two other fights broke out in other shelters. At a refugee home in Berlin's Kreuzberg area, a 18-year-old struck a 17-year-old on the head with a belt, police said. Meanwhile,
...back at the Hubba Hubba Club, Big Shirley was still trying to snatch Nunzio bald-headed. She was already halfway there...
five people were maimed in a fight between Syrians in the showers of an accommodation in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt.
Such disturbances have occurred before in other shelters in Germany, with tensions escalating quickly between often traumatized people from different cultures sharing packed spaces.
At the same time, they have been relatively rare
| How "relatively rare" could it be, if such incidents are "frequent", as Al Ahram reports? |
Germany's police union had called for refugees to be separated by religion and by country of origin to minimize the potential for conflict.