Protesters, police clash ahead of G7 summit

Leaders from the Group of Seven (G7) industrial nations will meet on Sunday in a German Alpine resort town, as thousands protested on the eve of the two-day summit. There were sporadic clashes with police and several marchers were taken to hospital with injuries, as thousands marched in the town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen on Saturday. Protester Monika Lambert said she had come “to exercise my democratic rights to say that everything the G-7 decides is in the interest of the banks and capitalists.” The Germans have deployed 17,000 police around the former winter Olympic Games venue at the foot of Germany’s highest mountain, the Zugspitze. Another 2,000 are on stand-by across the border in Austria. The demonstrations have so far been peaceful, Hans-Peter Kammerer, a police spokesman, said on Saturday, but that significant numbers of “extremists” from Germany, Austria, Italy, and Britain were thought to be joining the expected crowd of about 8,000. Al Jazeera’s Dominic Kane, reporting from Garmisch-Partenkirchen, said “protesters have promised to try to disrupt the proceedings as much as they can”.