BERLIN, May 4 (Xinhua) -- Politically motivated crimes in Germany reached a new record level last year with more than 44,000 cases, an increase of 8.5 percent and the highest number since the start of data collection in 2001, Minister of the Interior Horst Seehofer announced on Tuesday.
Violent crimes that were politically motivated even increased by 18.8 percent to a total of 3,365 cases in 2020. At the same time, eleven people became victims of political homicide and there were 13 attempted homicides with a political background.
Referring to the murder of a homosexual couple in Dresden in October last year, a homicide in Cottbus in March and the racially motivated terrorist attack in Hanau in February, Seehofer said at a press conference that there were "clear tendencies towards brutalization."
Slightly more than half of the political crimes, around 23,604, are right-wing motivated.
Seehofer stressed that right-wing extremism was the "greatest threat to security in our country, because most racist crimes are committed from this spectrum." Given Germany's history, this development was "very worrying" and "deeply shameful," he noted.
Left-wing motivated crimes reached 10,971 cases last year, according to data from the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA). Violent crimes from this spectrum increased by 45 percent compared to the previous year and reached 1,526.
Politically motivated crimes related to the COVID-19 pandemic, of which nearly 40 percent occurred in the course of protests against the government's health measures, totaled more than 4,000 cases last year, according to the BKA data.