ERKELENZ (dpa-AFX) - The two activists who had held out for days in an underground tunnel at the lignite site of Lützerath have expressed "destructiveness" to the police in clearing the site. "We observe with mixed feelings how much attention the media have paid to the tunnel," the initiative "Lützerath lebt" quoted the two activists as saying on Monday evening. "The questions we've been asked most often - how we're doing, what we did down there, how we built the tunnel - are absolutely irrelevant and completely miss the point." The two people, who call themselves "Pinky" and "Brain," had left the tunnel by midday Monday.

This brought the end of Lützerath within reach five days after the evacuation of the former village began. According to the energy company RWE, which wants to dredge coal there, these were the last activists on site, and the eviction by the police had thus ended. A spokesman for the initiative "Lützerath lebt" told the Deutsche Presse-Agentur in the evening that the two activists wanted to remain anonymous, so they published their statement "in cooperation".

It says: "The tunnel itself has no significance, the more decisive question is why it was built and occupied." It says that a large corporation, with the support of politicians, wanted to destroy an entire village "in order to increase its profits by extracting the most inefficient fossil fuel." And: "We are shocked by the destructiveness with which the police have once again made themselves the stooge of a large corporation."/wa/DP/stw