Harun Nasrullah
A hijab-wearing Muslim woman was verbally and physically abused at a Berlin metro station by a suspected far-right extremist on April 30.
The incident was the latest in a string of xenophobic attacks in the German capital in recent months targeting people of foreign appearance, including Muslim women with headscarves or Jewish men sporting kippahs.
The 33-year-old Muslim woman told police that a man uttered racial slurs and later assaulted her at the Greifswalder metro station.
She said the suspected far-right extremist showed the illegal Nazi salute before running away from the scene. The woman received medical treatment for her injuries, according to the police.
Germany has witnessed growing violence by far-right extremists in recent years, fuelled by the propaganda of neo-Nazi groups and the Islamophobic AfD party. Every day, at least three people become victims of far-right, racist, or xenophobic acts of violence in Germany, according to the VBRG, an umbrella group of counselling centres for victims of right-wing violence.
The incident came days after German Interior Minister expressed concerns that “no one should underestimate the German far-right AfD party’s youth wing’s danger.”
The country’s domestic intelligence agency, the BfV, said in a statement that the Junge Alternative’s position has become more radical, contradicting the principles of the free, democratic constitutional order.
“The Junge Alternative propagates a racial concept of society that is based on basic biological assumptions, postulates a nation that is as ethnoculturally homogeneous as possible, excludes migrants of non-European origin,” the agency said.
