Germany is to make deportation mandatory for foreign-born Salafists convicted of ideological acts of violence, the country's interior minister said Friday. Hans-Peter Friedrich and state ministers agreed at talks in Rostock that immigration officials would no longer have discretion to decide on a case-by-case basis if violent radicals' residence permits should be renewed.

"Whoever infringes the law, regardless of whether the grounds are political or religious, is on the way out. He'll be deported," said Friedrich, saying officials had been instructed to draft amendments to national and state laws. There was shock in Germany in May when a 26-year-old fundamentalist Muslim wounded two police officers who were separating Salafists from extreme rightists during a demonstration. The man, a Turkish national, was unrepentant as a court later jailed him for six years for the stabbings. A change in the law would make it easier to send him to Turkey, even if he protested that he had no relatives or livelihood there.

Copyright Deutsche Presse-Agentur, 2012