Featured Image Credit: Twitter/@AufstandLastGen
Topics: News, Climate Change
Joe Harker
A group of people holding a recent demonstration against climate change in Germany were dragged off the road they were blocking, with one protestor hauled away by her hair.
German climate activist group Letzte Generation ('last generation') were demonstrating on a road in Bottrop, Germany when they blocked the progress of a lorry.
Three people were sat across the road and some bystanders decided to forcibly drag the protestors onto the pavement.
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Two men seized one of the protestors by the arms and dragged them away, but when the men went to drag someone else, the protestor went and sat back down in the middle of the road and got dragged away again.
A blonde woman then joined in the efforts to drag the protestors away, grabbing one of the others by the hair and shouting at them with language we'd probably better not translate into English.
She dragged the girl by her hair while others seized the third protestor, but while people dragging the Letzte Generation activists away were focused on one person, the others would get back onto the road.
The girl who had been dragged by her hair sat back down right in front of the lorry, which had been trying to drive forwards, when the blonde woman went back over, grabbed her by the hair and forcibly dragged her onto the pavement.
The activist group posted footage of the incident to social media, along with other videos of the three protestors sitting in the middle of the road and blocking cars.
They (at least according to Twitter's translation tool, I did French in school) wrote: "Attention violence: Dragged off the street & pulled by the hair!
"Are we the ones who should be targeted when we peacefully take to the streets to draw attention to the fact that civilization is sinking into climate catastrophe?"
"Or shouldn't we rather blame the government that breaks the law and sends us all into a life-threatening future?"
Police said the activists were later taken into custody, and that the girl who had been dragged by her hair by the woman had been slightly injured.
Officials have been studying the footage of the altercation to determine whether criminal proceedings would be brought against the people who used force to drag the activists away.
Other activists from Letzte Generation, so named because if we don't do something about climate change they might well be one of the last generations, have protested by gluing their hands to roads, requiring the road surface to be dug up to remove them.
The group, which recently blocked runways at Hamburg and Dusseldorf airports, are calling on the German government to eliminate all man-made emissions by 2030, two decades sooner than the current climate change goal of 2050.