Hamburg cleans up after German May Day rioting (Roundup)

May 2, 2010, 16:04 GMT

Berlin/Hamburg - Hamburg began clearing up the debris Sunday after its central Schanzenviertel district suffered Germany's worst damage from two nights of May Day rioting in the country's main cities.

Police used water jets mounted on trucks to disperse a crowd of 650 young men, ostensibly leftists, who had smashed the windows of two banks, looted a chemist shop and burned a huge bonfire made of residents' plastic garbage bins and bicycles late Saturday.

Rioting has been an annual May Day event in Berlin and Hamburg for about two decades.

Hamburg police detained 77 people accused of rioting and said 30 police were hurt in the two nights of clashes. Violent youths hurled stones, bottles and fireworks at police trying to keep order, and ripped down bus shelters and roadsigns.

In Berlin, where a huge force of riot police had first separated leftists and neo-Nazi demonstrators and then quelled a separate leftist riot in the Kreuzberg neighbourhood Saturday evening, police said they had detained a total of 488 people, including 286 rightists.

One policeman was also facing assault charges after reports that he deliberately kicked a prone demonstrator on the ground. While 98 police were hurt in Berlin, police said they had been well prepared.

Not so in Hamburg, where a police trade union charged that commanders had been caught unprepared by the violence. Seven helicopters had to fly police reinforcements from Berlin to Hamburg as the violence escalated Saturday.

Senior police admitted they had not been expecting the Hamburg riot because the town's hardcore leftists and anarchists had departed to Berlin to spend Saturday obstructing the neo-Nazi parade.

City radio said a recent split in the city's far-left movement had also made it unlikely the radicals would unite to hold a parade.

Embittered residents of the Schanzenviertel district claimed the violence on their streets was the work of apolitical outsiders who had come to town looking for the thrill of hooligan fighting.

The political motivations of the Hamburg rioters were unclear, but a youth overheard phoning friends and saying, 'This is really exciting, this is so cool,' did not seem untypical of the rioters.

The website of a city newspaper, the Hamburger Abendblatt, published an anonymous open letter from an area leftist to the rioters which darkly warned, 'Next time we'll get involved and drive you out of our district, with or without police help.'