THOUSANDS of police in riot gear used water cannons, clubs and heavy vehicles yesterday to force the passage of a convoy carrying dangerous atomic waste against anti nuclear militants determined to block its path.
Violent clashes from dawn on(wards left at least 40 injured 10 among the nearly 10,000 police and some 30 among the estimated 3,000 protesters, of whom at least four were seriously hurt. About 50 demonstrators were arrested.
Throughout the morning police carrying riot shields surrounded the convoy for the 11 mile stretch by road from the railway station of Dannenberg to the Gorleben storage site in northern Germany, braving flaming barricades and projectiles of all sorts.
Despite the massive police deployment, one of the biggest seen in post war Germany, it took six hours to transport the special container of nuclear waste to Gorleben from Dannenberg, which it had earlier reached by rail from the treatment centre of La Hague in northern France.
The violence erupted shortly after the controversial cargo began to roll on by road from Dannenberg, hundreds of antinuclear militants having waited since early morning for its arrival.
The transport to Gorleben of a (shipment of nuclear waste from the Philippsburg power station in the south west of the country in April 1995 gave rise to confrontations between police and anti nuclear demonstrators, but yesterday's clashes were much more violent, police and protesters agreed. Sources on both sides likened the scenes to "war".
Police were the target of large stones, flare rockets and steel ball bearings fired by catapult.
They replied forcefully, bloodying heads with their clubs and making liberal use of their water cannon.
Every locality along the final stretch constituted a nest of resistance. The police accompanying the convoy were obliged each time to dismantle the barricades, remove farmers' tractors, extinguish fires and cart away heaps of manure.
Under a hail of epithets punctuated by the clatter of security force helicopters overhead, police held the demonstrators back from the road behind barriers along the route taken by the container, covered by a blue tarpaulin and discreetly marked with a yellow label reading "radioactive".
Germany, which has no treatment centres of its own for nuclear waste, is scheduled to receive some 110 cargos of this sort by the year 2003. The strategy of the anti nuclear militants is to render the cost of realising the shipments prohibitive.
The total cost of protecting the latest shipment is officially put at 55 million deutschmarks (£24.3 million) for the federal government and 28 million deutschmarks for the regions, with the mobilisation of 15,000 police officers and border guards from around the country.
In the days before the radioactive waste entered Germany by rail on Tuesday, there had been repeated acts of sabotage against the tracks and associated railway equipment.
The Interior Minister, Mr Manfred Kanther, had called on the security forces to counter the demonstrators "with the utmost determination", describing the saboteurs as "criminals".