Woman attacks children at Fasnacht in Beringen

Fasnacht in the Swiss town of Beringen ended with an arrest on Saturday after a woman attacked two children in public and injured an adult helper and a police officer, according to Schaffhausen police.

Police said the woman struck the children and kicked at them, and pushed one child off a wall. A spokesperson told Keystone-SDA the woman did not know the children.

The incident shows how quickly a large public event stops being a shared ritual and becomes a sequence of emergency roles. A carnival depends on thousands of small, unspoken agreements: adults keep an eye on nearby children, strangers accept noise and crowding, and minor conflicts are resolved with restraint. When someone breaks those rules, the first response is usually informal enforcement—someone steps in, pulls people apart, and tries to end it without turning the whole event into a police matter.

That is what happened here. An adult ran to help and was injured when the woman kicked him in the knee, police said. He was taken to hospital with injuries that were not immediately specified.

Only after that did the formal system take over. Police stopped the woman a short time later; officers said she insulted them and physically attacked them during the intervention. A policewoman was lightly injured.

The police said they are investigating. In a few minutes, a street festival that sells itself as harmless tradition produced three separate victims, a hospital visit, and an arrest report.

The woman was detained after the police stopped her, and the case is now in the hands of investigators.