GERMANY: A young man pushed another off a platform into the path of an oncoming train, for no apparent reason. It's part of a growing trend of frustrated youth violence, reports Derek Scally in Berlin.

Arkadius Müller (26) doesn't remember the day in December that changed his life. Like the others waiting on the subway, he ignored the young man murmuring to himself and wandering on the platform behind.

Without a word and with no reason, he pushed Arkadius off the platform, under the steel wheels of the oncoming train.

At least four carriages, each weighing 27 tonnes, rolled over Arkadius, partly severing his left arm and crumpling his body and left leg. He was rushed to hospital where doctors amputated his left arm at the elbow and rescued his left leg. Miraculously, he survived, lying for a month in a coma.

"When I woke, I thought I had been in a car accident, but now my father tells me that a mad man pushed me in front of the train," says Arkadius. He remembers nothing of the attack and is now trying to recover some sort of a life knowing that he was a victim of a brutal but meaningless crime.

Crime was a key theme in the last election campaign. The Kohl government had steered the country through the peaceful unification, but it seemed paralysed when it came to tackling the growing pains of the new Germany. Helmut Kohl promised East Germans "blossoming landscapes", instead they were left with devastated industry, record unemployment and frustrated youth, all contributing to a spike in crime statistics.

Shortly after taking office, the Schröder government set up a commission to prepare a "periodical security report". "We had newspapers reporting that the rapists and murderers were lurking around every corner, that attacks were rampant, random and motiveless," says Julianne Wetzel, a spokeswoman in the federal Justice Ministry in Berlin. "We decided to take a scientific and long-sighted approach to risk assessment. That way we could distribute resources to tackle problem areas, and prevent other areas becoming problems." A team of sociologists and criminologists worked together on the the 800-page report, which it presented to the government last July.

Some of the most valuable finds were in the area of youth crime, Germany's most frequent offenders. The study found that German youths are now two to three times as likely to be the perpetrator of a crime as an adult.

Classifying these youthful prepetrators was of little difficulty, with frequent recurrence of the classic unemployed, poorly-educated youths in eastern, and to a lesser extent western, states. But the experts had huge difficulty classifying motives for crimes that often lacked any. The authors found no proof that increasing youth sentences would reduce youth crime, whatever the motive.

Dennis Plenert (23) had no motive for pushing Arkadius Müller in front of the subway train last December.

Dennis told investigators that he only "pushed him in a dream" and is now in psychiatric treatment. Arkadius Mueller's dreams are gone: to play the violin he had played since childhood in an orchestra and to marry his girlfriend Malgrzata. Now his violin sits in a corner and he doesn't recognise his girlfriend.