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Two days after the fatal shooting of a 16-year-old, hundreds protested in Dortmund
Photo: Roberto Pfeil / dpa
Hundreds of people in a mosque in Dortmund commemorated a 16-year-old Senegalese man who was shot dead by the police.
Representatives of the Muslim and African community in the city called for clarification, but also warned against prejudice.
Dortmund's Lord Mayor Thomas Westphal (SPD) and representatives of the Protestant and Catholic Churches also took part in the celebration.
"The facts must be clarified," said Merkez Konseyi, spokesman for the council of the Muslim community in Dortmund.
"We forbid ourselves to be blamed." What is important now is cohesion in the city.
»The fact that we are all standing together today clearly shows that.«
Westphal: "What a difficult fateful situation for such a young man"
The 16-year-old lost everything while fleeing: his father, his mother and his brother, said Mayor Westphal.
"What a difficult fateful situation for such a young man." The rule of law is doing everything to clarify.
You shouldn't judge others.
The teenager was spotted with a knife in a youth center in Dortmund on Monday.
Caregivers called the police.
Despite the use of pepper spray and tasers, the youth attacked the police with a knife, according to the prosecutor.
A 29-year-old officer finally fired a salvo of six shots from a submachine gun.
The 16-year-old was hit by five bullets and seriously injured.
He died shortly afterwards during an emergency operation.
Shortly afterwards there were demonstrations against police violence in Dortmund.
There will be another demonstration on Friedensplatz in the late afternoon, to which left-wing groups have called.
They want to demonstrate on Peace Square under the motto »Justice for Mouhamed«.
The youth from Senegal had probably only been in town for a short time.
According to the information available there, the 16-year-old arrived in Germany in April 2022 as an unaccompanied minor refugee, the city of Dortmund said when asked.
He was only accommodated in Dortmund at the beginning of August.
"He has no family in Germany," said a spokeswoman for the city.
After his arrival, he was assigned to Rhineland-Palatinate according to the Königstein key - which regulates the distribution of refugees.
In the first week of August he was accommodated in the facility in the neighboring state of North Rhine-Westphalia by the youth welfare office responsible there, which has guardianship for him.
In an interview with Deutschlandfunk, North Rhine-Westphalia's Interior Minister Herbert Reul (CDU) said the 16-year-old was a "mentally ill person" who had been in a clinic the day before but had been released.
It is not known how long the teenager was in the hospital.
Helpers called the police on Monday, Reul continued, "because he's sitting there and wants to kill himself with a 20 cm long knife."
The Dortmund public prosecutor's office also confirmed to the dpa news agency that the young person had gone to a psychiatric ward shortly before the deployment because of mental problems.
bbr/swe/dpa