BERLIN (AP) — A 30-year-old German man was found guilty Wednesday of an anti-Semitic attack on a Jewish restaurant three years ago in the eastern German city of Chemnitz in which the owner was injured and the restaurant damaged.
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The Chemnitz district court ruled that the man, whose name was not given in line with German privacy rules, was found guilty of severe aggravated assault and breach of the peace. Judge Dominik Boerner convicted him of a one-year suspended prison sentence, the German news agency dpa reported.
The judge integrated a different conviction for drug dealing into the man’s sentence, dpa reported.
The man was part of a group that attacked the restaurant on August 27, 2018. The group threw cobblestones at the building which hit and injured the Jewish owner of the Schalom restaurant, dpa reported. The group also yelled anti-Semitic slurs during the assault. Investigators later found the man’s DNA on one of the stones, dpa reported.
The anti-Semitic attack was part of several days of far-right, anti-migrant riots following the fatal stabbing of a German man by a Syrian asylum-seeker in Chemnitz. Hundreds of far-right rioters came to Chemnitz from all over Germany protesting and chasing foreigners through the city.
At the opening of the trial, the defendant refused to talk. The owner of the Jewish restaurant, Uwe Dziuballa, said he was shocked that night when he stepped out and saw around 10 people, all in dark clothes, who looked at him with hate, dpa reported.
Next there were loud bangs, he recounted.
“This was completely surprisingly for me,” Dziuballa told the court, adding that his restaurant had been attacked before but there had never been such a massive attack directed at him personally.