About 2000 people gathered at the lignite opencast mine in Lützerath on Sunday. The activists want to delay the planned evacuation for weeks with their blockade. When checking a coach to Lützerath, the police confiscated superglue. The news ticker.
According to estimates by the Aachen police, around 2,000 climate activists gathered there on Sunday, a few days before the planned evacuation of the village of Lützerath. The action alliance “Lützerath cannot be cleared” invited to various protest actions, in which the well-known activist Luisa Neubauer also took part. Luka Scott, spokeswoman for the Ende Gelände group, told the AFP news agency that “an unbelievable number of people” were there.
About 1000 participants were expected. A video distributed on Twitter by “Parents for Future” showed Neubauer’s speech in Lützerath, in which she said: “At some point it has to be over. If you want less destruction, then you need less carry on.”
However, there was one change in the program items: the concert by the band AnnenMayKantereit had to be moved to another area because an embankment at the edge of the opencast mine was undermined. As a police spokesman said, the gate valve was opened during the night when the pipe was closed, causing thousands of liters of water to flow into the mine and undermine the embankment. There is danger to life in the area. In consultation with the organizers, the concert was postponed.
Various groups such as Ende Gelände, Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion have joined forces to form the action alliance. They want to prevent the police from clearing the occupied village. The energy company RWE wants to expand the Garzweiler opencast mine and mine the coal lying beneath the town, for which the village has to be excavated.
From Tuesday, an order from the Heinsberg district provided the authorities with the legal basis for this, but an urgent application before the Aachen administrative court failed. The procedure should be continued in the next instance. The activists have called for a large demonstration for next Saturday.
The Norddeutscher Rundfunk reported that a coach that was traveling from Hamburg to Lützerath was stopped by the Hamburg police early on Sunday morning. The approximately 50 passengers were checked and superglue confiscated, and the bus finally drove off three hours late.
