'Worrying' rise in hate crime: Minister

BERLIN, Germany -- German authorities have recorded a "worrying" 39 percent rise in violent racially-motivated crimes, says Interior Minister Otto Schily.

State authorities reported 553 far-right attacks on foreigners in 2000.

These included killings, bodily injury and fire bombings -- 156 more than during the same period in 1999, Schily told the weekly Die Woche.

A broader measure, the overall number of extreme-right, xenophobic and anti-Semitic crimes in Germany, rose by 45 percent to 13,753.

Most of those crimes involve the display of banned Nazi symbols and shouting of Nazi slogans in public, both outlawed in Germany.

"So there is a worrying increase," Schily told the paper.

A bombing, last summer, that injured 10 immigrants, including six Jews, and the fatal beating of a Mozambican immigrant by three young German skinheads, were high profile examples of the trend.

A disproportionate amount of the far-right violence happened in former communist East Germany, even though fewer foreigners live in the region than in the richer west, Schily said.

Experts often cite unemployment, a moral vacuum after the collapse of communism and frustration at being considered the nation's poor cousins, as being behind this.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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German Government

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