A Berlin operation to expel squatters living in the Kopi trailer camp’s left-wing Kopi has become a medieval standoff. Shield-bearing officers used armored vehicles and siege towers to smash the compound’s walls.
The “autonomists” living inside the housing project on 137 Kopenicker Street – commonly referred to as ‘Kopi’ by Berliners – in the center of the German capital had been fortifying their camp during the week, including placing barbed wire on top of the walls, ahead of the planned eviction on Friday.
They vowed to defend their home and stage protests elsewhere in Berlin, but this wasn’t enough to stop law enforcement from moving against yet another illegally occupied property in the city.
The operation involved around 2,000 officers, some storming the camp while others preventing provocative acts from happening in Berlin.
The police, dressed in full riot gear with protective body shields, retreated to the perimeter and tried to enter the trailer camp.
Footage by RT’s Ruptly video agency has captured a police armored vehicle being used to ram the walls of the makeshift fortress, but failing to break through.
The camp was being defended by masked men who threw projectiles at police officers and set flares on fire, all the while blasting music through the loudspeaker and shouting out obscenities.
Two siege towers of steel rods were brought by the police to dismantle the barricades.
The ‘castle’ fell only after the officers weakened a part of the wall with buzz-saws and tore it out with a towing wire attached to an APC.
After that, the police made their way into the hole in the barricade and soon started emerging, escorting Kopi’s inhabitants outside. Numerous arrests were made.
Members of Berlin’s radical-left scene have been squatting at Kopenicker Street since the 1990s and were even able to legalize their presence on the property. The building was auctioned and the judge ordered its eviction in June.
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WATCH: 60 Officers are injured in clash between left-wing extremists and squatters at Berlin’s German Police Station.
After illegal occupants were removed from a Berlin building on Liebig Street, the police shut down both the Mutiny club and Syndikat over the last two years.
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