Swastikas painted over Antifa tributes to Halle shul attack victims

Swastikas were discovered painted over tributes to the two victims of a shooting last year at a synagogue in Halle, Germany.

Ahead of the first anniversary of the attack, in which an armed extremist killed two people after failing to break into the synagogue on Yom Kippur, a far-left group called Antifa Halle stencilled the first names of the victims in various locations around the city.

Some of the stencils were painted over with a red swastika earlier this week, the Bild newspaper reported.

The municipality of Halle removed the swastikas.

• Special Report: One year after Halle  

A neo-Nazi sympathiser named Stephan Balliet confessed to the shooting at the Halle synagogue on Oct. 9, 2019. He was put on trial this summer. The attack is seen as a prime example in a rise of antisemitic activity in Germany.

Separately, a children’s playground on Lake Rheinau in western Germany was defaced with antisemitic slogans and swastikas, the news site tag24 reported Thursday.

And in northern Germany, blue and black paint was smeared on the walls of a Jewish cemetery in the town of Malchow on Wednesday night, DPA reported. The perpetrators also wrote the digits 187, which is slang for “murder,” as it is the criminal code used for murder by German police.