MOSCOW (Sputnik) — An unidentified group of people threw a number of Molotov cocktails at a planned refugee shelter in Germany’s Saxony region on Saturday in a bid to set the building on fire, local media reported.
Four refugees were inside the building at the time of the attack, but no one was injured, according to the German MDR television channel. The building was expected to host some 100 refugees in the coming weeks, the media reported.
According to local police, the number of arson attacks on refugee shelters in Germany has reached 800 in 2015, as the country faced a growing amount of hate crimes in the light of a major migrant inflow.
Europe is currently hit by the largest migrant crisis since World War II, with hundreds of thousands of people fleeing conflict-torn countries in the Middle East and North Africa.
Earlier in December, Bavaria's Social Minister Emilia Mueller said that the number of asylum seekers who have arrived in Germany since the beginning of 2015 has hit one million. According to Mueller, the number is based on the amount of migrant registrations processed by the EASY computer system, which is used to assign asylum seekers to German states based on their population and tax revenues.
