After clashes between activists and police at the anti-coal demonstration outside the village of Lützerath, both sides accused each other of violence. Minister of the Interior of North Rhine-Westphalia Herbert Reul (CDU) defended the police on Sunday night. This worked “highly professionally”, he said on the ARD Anne Will talk show. the german activist Luisa Neubauer contradict that, from their point of view, the operation was disproportionately violent.
But he will see to it that all cases of inappropriate police violence are investigated. “We saw one or two movies on the web where we thought, ‘This doesn’t look good.’ We are going to look at this closely, we have also filed a criminal complaint as a precaution, because I think this needs to be verified,” he said, referring to the practice of recent years. But it’s not like there was a mass of “crazed cops” at the demonstration. He would have liked the organizers of the demonstration to clearly distance themselves from the violence, but that has not happened.