Turkey’s Erdogan slams police raid on Berlin mosque as ‘racist’
ISTANBUL – Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has condemned a police raid on a mosque in the German capital Berlin earlier this week as racist and Islamophobic.
The police operation during morning prayers was “obviously nourished by racism and Islamophobia, which is bringing Europe a little bit closer to the darkness of the Middle Ages every single day, and completely disregards freedom of belief,” he tweeted overnight.
On Wednesday (21), some 150 police officers in the German capital raided several businesses and a mosque suspected of fraudulently claiming subsidies related to the coronavirus pandemic, seizing 7,000 euros in cash, data storage devices, computers and files.
Prosecutors said the raid was aimed at three suspects who had applied for 70,000 euros, of which 45,000 had been paid. Some of the money is alleged to have been paid into the account of the mosque in the Kreuzberg neighbourhood.
Erdogan said that Turkey will continue fighting against all forms of racism, xenophobia and Islamophobia anywhere in the world.
The Turkish Foreign Ministry called the operation “yet another example of the biased, discriminatory, and disproportionate treatment of the Muslim community, whose number is approaching five million in Germany.”
It said a day after the raid that “German authorities must understand the fact that Muslims are an integral part of Germany and put an end to excluding and marginalizing them.”
-dpa