Ghanaian Beaten, Stabbed for Speaking English

Nauen, Germany -- The long list of racially motivated assaults in Germany has just got longer with the beating and stabbing of a Ghanaian man caught speaking English outside a night club in an eastern town on Friday night.

An African man was beaten and stabbed by three German teenagers outside a nightclub in the latest of a long series of racist attacks in eastern Germany.

Police said the 22-year-old man, named only as Daniel G., had enraged the three 18-year-old men because he had been speaking English to his girlfriend. The doorman of the nightclub in Nauen near Berlin had refused to let him into the club and he was talking to his girlfriend about it when the three assailants approached him.

"Why are you speaking English, Nauen is in Germany," one of them shouted, the newspaper Bild reported. Another man pushed him to the ground and they started kicking him. One of them pulled out a knife and stabbed him.

Police said the victim, a trainee retailer from Ghana who has lived in Berlin for over four years, managed to defend himself with pepper spray. He and his girlfriend fled to the railway station with the attackers in pursuit but police arrived in time to stop them attacking him again. The victim was taken to hospital with a stab wound to the kidney but it wasn't deep enough to be life-threatening.

Two of the attackers, named only as Nils N. and Merlin Maria D., were caught and confessed to the attack. They face assault charges but have been granted conditional release pending the court case. The third assailant faces no charges because he was deemed to have played only a minor role.

Racially motivated attacks are a frequent occurrence in Germany, especially in the former communist east where far right parties are now represented in three of the region's five federal states.

The domestic intelligence agency recorded a total of 919 assaults motivated by far-right extremism last year, up from 816 in 2005. Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble said this month that he was alarmed that young people were increasingly adopting far-right attitudes.

"We have to undertake every effort to get young people to support democratic views," he said. But he did not say how, and he identified Islamic terrorism as the gravest threat to stability and security in Germany.