\n A tree planted at the site of a fatal attack on this year’s Berlin Pride march has been destroyed, just days after a commemorative rainbow bench there was vandalised, German police said on Sunday.\n <\/p>\n
The maple, planted in August in Berlin’s Tiergarten park, was uprooted on the eve of a key election in the neighbouring state of Saxony-Anhalt in which the far-right, anti-LGBTQ AfD party is expected to secure an easy majority.<\/p>\n
The tree and bench constituted a place of remembrance for victims of a suspected jihadist attack on the Pride march in July that killed a 65-year-old Polish woman and wounded around 30 people.<\/p>\n
“The commemorative tree was… pulled up by the roots,” a police spokeswoman told AFP, confirming a report by public radio RBB.<\/p>\n
Last week, police said wooden slats from the adjacent rainbow bench had been torn off with “considerable physical violence”.<\/p>\n
They noted that other benches nearby had been left intact.<\/p>\n
“I say to all the queer people in this city: you are not alone,” Werner Graf, head of the Green group in the Berlin parliament, said on Sunday.<\/p>\n
“We will replant this tree — as often as necessary.”<\/p>\n
Mitte district council has pledged to replace the vandalised bench, which it said “stands for our freedom and for solidarity with the queer community”.<\/p>\n
“Whoever destroyed it wants to make a statement against these values. Our basic values are not up for debate,” Mitte district mayor Stefanie Remlinger said on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
Revellers at the July Pride march — one of Europe’s largest — were targeted in a vehicle ramming and machete attack, which police suspect was carried out by a 21-year-old German man who had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group.<\/p>\n
Police shot the suspect dead the following day after he had gone on the run.<\/p>\n
July’s attack was one of several which have shaken Germany in recent years.<\/p>\n
The deadliest was a car ramming that killed six people and injured more than 300 at a Christmas market in 2024 in Magdeburg, the capital of Saxony-Anhalt.<\/p>\n
The convicted perpetrator was a Saudi national who supported far-right views and radical conspiracy theories.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A tree planted at the site of a fatal attack on this year’s Berlin Pride march has been…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":160769,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[99],"tags":[112,190],"class_list":["post-160768","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-berlin","tag-berlin","tag-germany"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@dk\/117226726061764522","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160768","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=160768"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160768\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/160769"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=160768"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=160768"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=160768"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}