Police Raid against Online-Demonstrators

This morning, police officers broke the bureau of the initiative 'Libertad!' and confiscated all computers aswell as several harddiscs, cdroms and documents. The background of this is the online demonstration to which the initiative 'Libertad!' mobilised for, this year on the 20th of June, to protest against deportations of refugees by the airline 'Deutsche Lufthansa AG'. Frankfurt a. M. 17th Oct. 2001

After Online-Demonstrations against lufthansa.com : Police Raid against Opposers of Deportations
This morning, police officers broke the bureau of the initiative 'Libertad!' and confiscated all computers aswell as several harddiscs, cdroms and documents. The rooms of the homes of those, responsible for the websites of this group 'Libertad!' and sooderso.de ,
have been searched aswell. Also in this place the police took away 6 computers and more than hundred cdroms. The background of this is the online-demonstration to which the initiative 'Libertad!' mobilised for, this year on the 20th of June, to protest against deportations of refugees by the airline "Deutsche Lufthansa AG". Accordung to the search order of the court [Amtsgericht] Frankfurt 13.614 people took part in this action on the 20th of June. Because Lufthansa claims - without proving it - economic damage by more than 1.2 million page-hits, the police denounces this online-action as 'Nötigung' and the calls for protests declared by more than 150 participating human rights groups and refugee-councils are denounced as Anstiftung zu Straftaten? [calls for criminal actions]
This is an attac to the freedom of demonstrations said Anne Morell, who had announced this demonstrations officially already on the 10th of June to the municipal administration office 'Ordnungsamt' Köln, this morning. It is a scandal, that 13.000 demonstrators are criminalized, whereas enterprises, making profits by deportations, can do their business in the internet? an activist said angrily. During the police raids big material damage was caused. All doors have been broken in the Third-World-House of Frankfurt, where, besides the bureau of Libertad, also the amnesty international group and many other initiatives have their rooms. Inspite of hints by the Libertad-operator, the chair of the Third-World-House was not informed by the police. Instead the officers preferred to break the entrance-door. In contrary to the search order itself, the officers could not even be stopped by the chairs to raid the rooms of all the other initiatives in the house.
The Libertad! Initiative, that exists since 1993 and that engages herself for political prisoners, sees her work hindered heavily by the confiscation of the 10 computers and important documents. Meanwhile a software-toolkit for online-demonstrations has been put to the web on the homepage of the online-demonstrators. We hope, that e-protest in the age of e-commerce will rise said Anne Morell and we call all democrats and opposers of deportation to protest against this shortsighted police-state-mentality?

For Libertad!

Sven Maier Phone: 0049-0177-5029083 Email:

online-demo@gmx.net Homepage: go.to/online-demo