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CRIME

Police shoot out excavator tires after drunken joy ride

A drunken joy ride through Lower Saxony with an excavator ended in gunshots Saturday, after the 23-year-old driver refused to stop, police reported.

Published: 5 July 2009 10:28 CEST
Police shoot out excavator tires after drunken joy ride
Photo: DPA

The man stole the excavator after visiting a disco near the Lower Saxon town of Delmenhorst. He tried to drive it home and went past a police car. The car tailed the earth-mover for 40 minutes, a trip of 15 kilometres, but could not stop it, even when four other police vehicles joined in the chase.

Then police tried spraying pepper spray into the driver’s cabin, but the spray had no effect. The drunken excavator driver then rammed two police cars, prompting police to pull out their weapons and shoot out the vehicle’s tires.

The driver was then pulled out of the earth-mover and during his arrest, bitten on the arm by a police German shepherd. In addition to being drunk and resisting arrest, the 23-year-old did not possess a driver’s license, police said.

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CRIME

Teenager turns self in after attack on German politician

A 17-year-old has turned himself in to police in Germany after an attack on a lawmaker that the country's leaders decried as a threat to democracy.

Published: 5 May 2024 12:52 CEST
Teenager turns self in after attack on German politician

The teenager reported to police in the eastern city of Dresden early Sunday morning and said he was “the perpetrator who had knocked down the SPD politician”, police said in a statement.

Matthias Ecke, 41, European parliament lawmaker for Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats (SPD), was set upon by four attackers as he put up EU election posters in Dresden on Friday night, according to police.

Ecke was “seriously injured” and required an operation after the attack, his party said.

Scholz on Saturday condemned the attack as a threat to democracy.

“We must never accept such acts of violence,” he said.

Ecke, who is head of the SPD’s European election list in the Saxony region, was just the latest political target to be attacked in Germany.

Police said a 28-year-old man putting up posters for the Greens had been “punched” and “kicked” earlier in the evening on the same Dresden street.

Last week two Greens deputies were abused while campaigning in Essen in western Germany and another was surrounded by dozens of demonstrators in her car in the east of the country.

According to provisional police figures, 2,790 crimes were committed against politicians in Germany in 2023, up from 1,806 the previous year, but less than the 2,840 recorded in 2021, when legislative elections took place.

A group of activists against the far right has called for demonstrations against the attack on Ecke in Dresden and Berlin on Sunday, Der Spiegel magazine said.

According to the Tagesspiegel newspaper, Interior Minister Nancy Faeser is planning to call a special conference with Germany’s regional interior ministers next week to address violence against politicians.

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