Dozens of Afghans with serious criminal records were handed $1,100 in cash and put on a plane to Kabul on Friday morning, but a leading figure of Germany’s hard left came out against the idea, stating there was simply no point in trying.
Green party politician Anton Hofreiter — the party of so-called ‘watermelons’ because they are green on the outside but hard-left Marxist reds below the surface — decried the first German deportation flight to Afghanistan of the year taking off on Friday morning, because he found the exercise pointless. Those aboard would be murdered by the Taliban or would simply break into Germany again, he argued.
He said, reports national broadsheet Die Welt: “Under certain circumstances, some of them might be back here more quickly to commit further crimes in Europe than if they had remained in prison”. It would be safer to keep them in prison indefinitely on the German taxpayer’s dime, he said, while also criticising the government for having recently toughened border checks, arguing it is better to talk rather than throw up walls.
Hofreiter’s interjection came as the first deportation flight to Afghanistan of the year took off from Leipzig to Kabul on Friday morning. There were 81 people aboard, down from the 100 who were meant to fly due to incomplete paperwork, while Afghans are said to have gone to ground recently in a bid to resist being removed.
All abroad were described as serious criminals, with convictions including murder, manslaughter, attempted murder, and assault. Others were serious sex criminals, and the flight reportedly contained several convicted drug dealers. One passenger of the deportation flight was convicted for his part in the gang rape of a 14-year-old girl in Germany.
Deportees were handed €1,000 ($1,100) cash as they departed Germany. In the past, deportations have been blocked because lawyers argued that sending Afghans to Afghanistan with nothing would harm their human right not to be “impoverished”. The cash would give the passengers a fair start at a new life in their native land, therefore.
The flight is the first this year and only the second from Germany to Afghanistan after the Taliban took power following the Joe Biden withdrawal in 2021.
Afghanistan is one of the largest origins for non-European migrants in Germany, with over 440,000 known to reside in the country.
Earlier this year, the German government published per-capita crime rates for the first time. It found that non-migrant Germans were listed as the suspect in a crime at a rate of 18 per 1,000 head of population. Afghans were four times more likely to be named as the suspect in a crime than Germans — even when excluding migration-related crimes, like being in the country illegally — at a rate of 87 per 1,000.
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