Between 60 mostly Arab men armed with machetes and metal pipes attacked each other in public. The mass brawl resulted in a state of emergency declared in the town of Duisburg.
A police official told the German daily Der Westen: “There are three rival groups. It may be a conflict between Turks, Lebanese and Kurds.
“Unlike with a demonstration of that size, we do not have a contact person, nobody wants to talk to the police.”
He said: “The officers got the situation under control before it escalated,” but onlookers had time to film the brutality in shocking photos before officers “intervened with high force” and could deploy CS gas canisters to gain control over the fighting crowd.
Some 50 people were arrested but most were released because they had refused to talk to the police.
Police were called out to the Altmarkt area of the city were Arabs were using telescopic batons and iron bars to beat up rivals. The law enforcement offers were spat at and had objects hurled at them when they tried to intervene. They found machetes on the scene, German tabloid Bild reported.
The police spokesman said similar incidents had taken place the night and the week before.
The German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier had visited Duisburg’s “no-go area” just days before as a “catastrophe tourist”, a critique often directed at Chancellor Angela Merkel too. The city has been struggling with crime “clans” from Lebanon.
In Britain, the Express newspaper disabled comments on their message board feature says “Comments Unavailable” for their article on this mass fight involving Middle Eastern men, unlike all the other news stories on the right side panel involving anti-conservative news reports.