A Berlin artist has taken on an unusual task - transforming symbols of hate into colourful graffiti.

Starting this year, Ibrahim Omari and a team of like-minded fans of street art have gone around using the same tools that neo-Nazis employ - spraypaint - to turn swastikas into flowers, owls, insects and other pleasant forms.

The "Paintback" initiative started after Mr Omari, who owns a shop that sells accessories for graffiti artists, found out about a large swastika painted in a playground in his district of Berlin, Schoeneberg. Such symbols are illegal in Germany, but perpetrators are rarely caught.

So Mr Omari and his friends took supplies from his own shop and "turned the swastika into a mosquito and then a net" for catching Nazis, he told Berlin reporters in a recent interview. "Our answer to these hate-filled messages is love, and beauty. That was the cornerstone of the whole project."

Mr Omari's family fled the Lebanese civil war in the early 1990s. He recalled how, in his early days in Berlin, groups of neo-Nazis would harass "anyone who looked foreign". He later co-founded an association for Cultural Heritage, to provide workshops for young graffiti artists. A prime objective is, he said, to get youth to combat racism.