According to local publications, the dispute escalated after the young girl, who was traveling with her friends, was told by three men and three women on the train that wearing a mask was a legal requirement. The three men and three women attacked the girl when she got off of the train, holding her on the ground and punching and kicking her. They also reportedly shouted racial slurs at her, and one of the female attackers tore out some of her hair. Her injuries were so bad that she had to be hospitalized.
The three men, who were aged 51, 44 and 42, were later detained by police after being found in a nearby pub. They were reportedly drunk, and one of them had narcotics in his possession. All three have denied the allegations. Police are currently investigating the three women who were also involved in the attack using video footage of the incident.
The COVID-19 restrictions in Germany at the moment include a mandate for wearing masks while using public transportation. In addition, people are required to present a COVID-19 vaccine passport or proof that they have recovered from the virus. In the U.S., the CDC also requires people using public transportation such as trains, buses and planes to wear masks.
The attack came just days after Germany’s left-wing president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, demanded that people be “louder" and “more visible” in their pro-mandate activities. He said that the country's vaccinated majority needed to come down stronger against those who go against their extreme mandates.
Steinmeier said: “Being the majority is not enough. The majority must become politically recognizable. It must not retreat. The silent center must become more visible, more self-confident and also louder.”
The overall vaccination rate in Germany is currently 75 percent. Interestingly, a recent report by the government admitted that around 80 percent of the country's omicron cases were among people who were vaccinated.
Clashes related to mask wearing are becoming increasingly common
Unfortunately, this young girl is not the only person who has been victimized by mask-related aggression. In a different argument about mask wearing, a 20-year-old cashier at a German gas station was shot dead by a 49-year-old man after asking him to wear a mask inside the establishment. The man had initially left after being told he needed to wear a mask but then returned around an hour later, where he argued again with the cashier and then shot him in the head. The shooter later went to a police station and confessed, claiming he was stressed out over coronavirus measures.
Following that incident, the German government responded by pressuring social media groups to stop spreading what they called misinformation about the murder and the virus in general. For example, the Interior Minister of the State of Thüringen called for messaging platform Telegram to be reclassified as a social network so that it would be subject to rules requiring it to delete content the government deems “criminal.”
There have been many reports of clashes over people not wearing masks, both in Germany and around the world, with some involving violent arrests.
Germany is also under fire for pushing falsified data on COVID-19 vaccines. When their practices were outed by reporters, German authorities insisted that the measures they put in place for unvaccinated individuals were based on a “software error.”
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