LAST UPDATE | 17 Jan 2023

CLIMATE ACTIVIST GRETA Thunberg has been detained during a protest at a German village being which was being demolished to make way for a coal mine expansion.

“The group is in the custody of the police,” a police spokeswoman said when asked about the arrest of Thunberg and other activists.

Images showed the activist, smiling and dressed in black, being picked up by police officers wearing helmets and then escorted to a waiting bus.

Police said a group of activists were detained after having “broken away from the demonstration”, and run towards the edge of the open-cast coal mine.

They were taken away from the “danger zone” by bus, their identities were checked, and then they were released, a spokesman said.

The process took “several hours” as there were a large number of protesters, he said, without giving a precise figure.

The activists were not formally arrested, police said.

The protests came a day after the last two climate activists holed up in a tunnel beneath the village of Luetzerath left the site.

Activists also occupied a giant digger at another coal mine in the west of the country as part of today’s demonstrations and joined a protest march near Luetzerath.

Police and energy company RWE started evicting protesters from Luetzerath on January 11, removing roadblocks, chopping down treehouses and bulldozing buildings.

Greta Thunberg carried out and detained at protest by German police pic.twitter.com/nCwFAsu7H5

— The Independent (@Independent) January 17, 2023

Activists have cited the symbolic importance of Luetzerath for years, and thousands of people demonstrated on Saturday against the razing of the village by RWE for the expansion of the Garzweiler coal mine.

Several activists ran over to the Garzweiler open pit mine, according to German news agency dpa. They stood at the brink of the open pit, which has a sharp break-off edge. Police said it was dangerous and people were prohibited from staying there.

RWE has permission for the expansion of the mine under a compromise agreement signed with the government, led by Social Democrat Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

Under the deal agreed in October, Luetzerath will be demolished, while five neighbouring villages are spared.

At the same time, RWE also agreed to stop producing electricity with coal in western Germany by 2030 — eight years earlier than planned.

With Russia’s gas supply cut in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine, Germany has fallen back on coal, firing up mothballed power plants.

The extension to the mine is deemed necessary to secure Germany’s future energy supply.

But activists argue extracting the coal will mean Germany misses targets under the key Paris climate agreements.