The Italian authorities on Thursday released 37 German nationals who were detained during anti-Group of Eight demonstrations in Genoa last week, leaving three Germans still in custody, officials said.
A journalist from Berlin was among those freed.
A spokesman for the German Foreign Ministry in Berlin, however, said Italian authorities were still holding 15 anti-globalization activists of the 70 Germans initially detained and that four people were still hospitalized in Genoa.
An Italian judge ordered further investigative custody for four of those being held.
Further hearings are to be conducted Thursday, the ministry said in a statement.
Representatives from the German consulate in Milan and the embassy in Rome visited all German protestors still held on Tuesday and Wednesday, the statement continued.
Meanwhile two German Greens Party deputies, including the prominent lawyer Hans-Christian Stroebele, arrived in the Italian port city Wednesday and visited several of those injured in the riots that marred the three-day G8 summit.
Witnesses have accused Italian police of brutality against anti-globalization demonstrators as hardline extremists trashed entire neighborhoods while police stood by.
Stroebele has called for an international fact-finding commission to investigate the claims and said that witness reports of police brutality reminded him of accusations leveled at Argentina's former military junta.
The second deputy, Annelie Buntenbach, slammed Italian authorities for expelling protestors from the country immediately after their release.
Buntenbach said that on Thursday morning she and Stroebele had met the Genoa police chief Gianni De Gennaro, who defended a police raid on the headquarters of the anti-globalization protest movement Genoa Social Forum during which the majority of German protestors were detained.
She said De Gennaro argued that those staying at the GSF headquarters were behind the bulk of the two days of violence in Genoa that ran parallel to the G8 summit.
But Buntenbach said that all the demonstrators with whom she and Stroebele had spoken disputed this.
Several activists staying at the school serving as headquarters for the GSF, which organized a largely peaceful anti-globalization march of more than 150,000 people Saturday through Genoa, accused police of carrying out brutal, unprovoked attacks on them during the midnight raid -- ROME (AFP)
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