Renewed riots in Leipzig despite ban on protest at jailing of student

Police and protesters clashed again in the eastern German city of Leipzig on Saturday evening, after people gathered to protest in defiance of the top court's ban of the left-wing protest.

Police said there were "massive riots" as protesters threw fireworks, stones, bottles and incendiary devices at officers during the demonstration at Alexis-Schumann-Platz.

Stones and other projectiles hit several officers and some were injured, the police said on Saturday evening, though they did not provide exact figures.

The police surrounded some of the demonstrators and prepared several water cannon though they did not use them, a spokesman said.

Around 1,500 people gathered for the demonstration on Saturday afternoon, with a third of them were prepared to use violence, police said.

The police appealed to the public to distance themselves from criminals and to behave peacefully. "Bystanders are asked to leave or avoid the area," they said in a tweet.

Meanwhile state Left Party politicians criticized the policing. Left Party parliamentary secretary in Saxony's parliament, Marco Böhme, said the police had let the situation escalate through the "de facto ban" in a tweet.

Kerstin Köditz, a left-wing member of the state parliament, criticized the decision to stop the demonstrators. "De-escalation looks different," she tweeted.

Left-wing alliance Dresden Nazifrei called the policing "martial."

State lawmaker for the conservative Christian Democrats (CDU), Sebastian Fischer, on the other hand defended the police deployment, saying, "The state has a monopoly on the use of force! Whoever uses violence will feel the consequences."

Saxony's premier Minister Michael Kretschmer, who earlier visited the police monitoring centre with state interior minister Armin Schuster, both CDU, thanked the police. "The goal is to protect people and property and to arrest violent criminals," Kretschmer tweeted

Only 100 people had been registered to attend the protest on Saturday. A larger gathering was banned by a series of courts, including Germany's highest court, the Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe, despite an urgent application to allow the radical leftist demonstration to go ahead.

The Karlsruhe court upheld the ban on Saturday by two previous courts that had ruled against the rally on concerns about it turning violent.

The motto of Saturday's demonstration was "Freedom of assembly also applies in Leipzig." The larger left-wing demonstration for so-called "Day X" due to start at 5 pm (1500 GMT) had been banned.

The gathering is in support of a 28-year-old student who was sentenced to five years in prison for assaulting alleged or actual neo-Nazis this week. Three co-defendants were also jailed. The woman is only known as Lisa E under German privacy laws.

The protest was initially peaceful, according to reports.

Large numbers of police and a helicopter circled over the square.

Police were initially not allowing protesters to march and demanded that they remove any coverings disguising their identity.

The authorities had set up checkpoints on roads into parts of Leipzig earlier in anticipation of the protests.

Tension had been rising for much of the day, with police bracing themselves for violence after riots had already erupted the night before.

Several vehicles and rubbish bins had been set on fire early on Saturday afternoon. At the time, there were fewer than 10 fires in Leipzig, mainly in the south and south-west, according to a police spokeswoman.

On Friday evening, 700 hooded individuals had attacked police at what was an initially peaceful gathering, damaging several nearby vehicles including emergency vehicles and injuring 23 police officers and a journalist.

Four people were arrested for aggravated breach of the peace.

There had been a large call-out on social networks from left-wingers for a large gathering to show solidarity for Lisa E.

She was provisionally released after the verdict was announced on Wednesday because she had been in pre-trial detention for two and a half years. The court also cited health reasons and media coverage as reasons for her release.