250,000 Germans in Vigil Against Racist Attacks
About 250,000 people took part Friday in a huge vigil in the city of Essen to oppose the racist attacks that have gripped Germany for more than four months.
Despite freezing temperatures, the crowd formed a four-mile-long ring of candlelight encircling downtown Essen for about half an hour, organizers said. Church bells pealed as the circle took shape at dusk.
Two refugees died Friday in a fire at a home for asylum seekers in Bietigheim-Bissingen, 12 miles north of Stuttgart, but an investigator said police had ruled out rightist attack as the cause.
The fire broke out in an area of the building not readily accessible to outsiders, said the Stuttgart investigator, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
An unidentified man and an 18-year-old Pakistani woman died in the fire, and another refugee was injured, officials said.
Earlier, ZDF television had reported that police were not ruling out a radical rightist attack.
A neo-Nazi fire bombing killed three Turks in a northern town on Nov. 23. Since then, hundreds of thousands of Germans and foreigners have taken part in candlelight vigils to show solidarity against neo-Nazis.
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