The Dresden Regional Court sentenced two right-wing extremists to prison terms for violent attacks on refugees at the 2016 city festival. A 31-year-old with multiple criminal records has to be jailed for five years and eight months. The criminal chamber imposed three years and eight months on a 35-year-old. The prosecutor had asked for six years and three years and three months. The judgments are not yet final.
The court is convinced that the defendants were among the 40 or so men who hunted down refugees in Dresden on the night of August 21, 2016. The group had beaten or kicked people from Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq at random, some of them masked, and shouted xenophobic slogans. The defense lawyers had pleaded for acquittal in the absence of evidence that their clients had been there. The defendants had remained silent until the end of the process that began in September 2019.