German police fired tear gas and used water cannons to quell riots during a controversial Eritrean music festival in the city of Giessen in the German state of Hesse.
About a hundred arrests were made and 26 policemen were injured, mainly by stone throwing, the police said.
The organizers of the festival are accused of being closely tied to the regime in Eritrea, an authoritarian one-party state where the opposition is persecuted and politicians and journalists critical of the regime are imprisoned without trial.
Hesse’s interior minister Peter Beuth says that “such an escalation of violence with targeted attacks on our task forces” is completely unacceptable.
There were also riots at last year’s festival and the authorities have tried to stop it, but a court overturned the decision.