‘A bit strange’: hiking group in Germany reported to police as illegal migrants

Club consisting of many Syrians living in Germany has its trip interrupted, as attitudes to migration seem to be hardening

For the past seven years, they’ve crisscrossed Germany, climbing mountains, following babbling streams and trekking through leafy forests.

It was the hiking club’s most recent outing in the eastern state of Saxony, however, that thrust them into uncharted territory. As members of the group, many of them Syrians living in Germany, made their way through the area’s spectacular scenery, a call was made to police to report a group of migrants, amid suspicions that they had been smuggled across the nearby Czech border.