Reuters. Police on Thursday (October 20) suspected a fire that broke out at a hotel housing Ukrainian refugees in northeastern Germany was a case of politically motivated arson.
Fourteen guests, most of them Ukrainians, and three staff were in the half-timbered thatch-roofed Hotel Schaefereck when the fire began on Wednesday evening, according to police in Rostock who said none of them were hurt.
"As things stand, arson is suspected and a political motivation is assumed," police said in a written statement.
The blaze erupted at 9:20 p.m. in the hotel Schaefereck near the Baltic seashore in the village of Gross Stroemkendorf, which since April served as accommodation for Ukrainians fleeing their country.
Prosecutors have ordered a specialist fire investigator to look into the cause of the blaze, police said, adding that they were now assessing the damage to the building.
The blaze, in the sparsely populated, poor eastern state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, took place near where, in August 1992, hundreds of far-right radicals rioted against asylum seekers for two days, throwing petrol bombs at their encampments, in post-war Germany's worst anti-immigrant mob attacks.
