According to DW, Susanne Grunert, the presiding judge in the Bonn court, charged the 21-year-old attacker with bodily harm and incitement of hatred with an anti-Semitic motive for striking the yarmulke off the head of Yitzhak Melamed in 2018. According to Grunert, by doing so the assailant had endangered public order.
According to Melamed himself, he was hurt more by a "gang of four Bonn police officers" who mistook him for the attacker, who said he was more "ashamed of [the police]" than by the assault itself.
The interior minister of North Rhine Westphalia apologized for the actions of the officers involved, who were not prosecuted as no basis for legal action against them was found following an investigation by the public prosecutor, DW reported.
The Jewish community has seen a 10-percent rise in antisemitic crime in the federation between 2017 and 2018, with a gunman trying – and failing – to storm a synagogue in Halle last Wednesday, killing two and injuring two in a local kebab shop.
Referring to the statistics, Medamed's lawyer Carsten Ilius said that "Jewish existence – and this is crazy – is again precarious in Germany."