Lubeck / Germany (RNC Agency) 26.05.1997

Religious leaders on Monday denounced a weekend arson attack on a Lübeck church by right-wing extremists and vowed it would not influence their campaign to uphold the rights of asylum seekers in Germany. Suspected neo-Nazis daubed swastikas on the facade o f St Vicelin Church and set a fire which spread to the church early on Sunday. They also scrawled the name of a local priest whose parish is sheltering a family of asylum seekers to prevent their deportation back to Algeria. "This is attack on our democrat ic values and was intended to intimidate us...(but) this must not be allowed to happen," the protestant Bishop of Lübeck, Karl Ludwig Kohlwage, told North German radio."We were right to take in the Algerian family...it makes the authorities think again abo ut their decision and about whether they were sending the family to prison, torture and eventually their deaths," Kohlwage said. The attack, which gutted the Roman Catholic church, sparked memories of a wave of racist violence after German unification in 1 990 in which asylum-seekers' hostels became frequent targets of firebomb attacks. Lübeck Mayor Michael Bouteiller said the city's efforts to protect the rights of foreigners were a "provocation" to extreme right-wingers and appealed to the authorities to p ut an end to the violence by banning all extreme rightist parties. Police commissioned an unusually large team of 40 detectives on the case. They suspect extreme right-wingers and prosecutors are treating the attack as aggravated arson. Protestant priest G uenther Harig, whose name was scrawled on the St Vicelin church but who works in another parish, gave refuge to a family of Algerian asylum-seekers inside his church after authorities refused them asylum at the beginning of May. It was the first case of "c hurch asylum" granted by a Lübeck parish. Harig said he had since received threats. Bishop Kohlwage said he had also been the target of a recent attack in which swastikas were daubed on his house and a fire set in his garden.