Bullet holes found at black German MP’s office

FRANKFURT AM MAIN — Germany's only black MP reported finding bullet holes in the windows of his constituency office on Wednesday, prompting outrage and alarm that the country's politicians are facing increasing levels of intimidation and violence.

Karamba Diaby, a lawmaker for the centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), posted about the attack on Twitter, saying police and security services were investigating and attaching a photo showing three impact points on a pane of glass.

"One window with my face on it has several bullet holes," he said.

Foreign Minister and party colleague Heiko Maas tweeted that the suspected attack was "unbelievable, disgusting and cowardly".

"We will continue standing by your side for a free, tolerant and diverse democracy," he added.

The attack comes as German politicians at all levels increasingly become targets of violence, with police statistics suggesting that most suspects were linked to the far-right.

Police figures gathered by weekly Welt am Sonntag this week showed significant increases in such acts in many of Germany's 16 states last year.

Attacks on politicians and officials in Thuringia and Saxony, both neighbouring states to Diaby's home in Saxony-Anhalt, more than doubled year-on-year, to 101 and 197 respectively.

Born in Senegal, Diaby moved to then-communist East Germany in the 1980s after winning a scholarship to study there.

In a 2017 interview with AFP, he recalled experiencing racism both before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification in 1989-90, suffering a beating from neo-Nazis in 1991.

But he went on to get his doctorate in chemistry, marry a German, and in 2001 obtained German nationality.

He has represented the city of Halle since 2013, defending his seat in 2017 even as far-right, anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany entered parliament for the first time.