A Syrian man turned himself in and confessed to stabbing to death three people and wounding several others at a festival in the western German city of Solingen on Friday, police said.
Two men, aged 67 and 56, and a woman aged 56 died in the attack, which has shocked Germany and prompted opposition parties to call for tighter rules on migrants.
German prosecutors accuse the 26-year-old of being a member of ISIS. The militant group claimed the attack through its Amaq news service. However, it offered no evidence to back up its claim.
In a statement, prosecutors said that due to his “radical Islamist convictions, [the suspect] decided to kill as many people as possible at the Solingen city festival.”
The suspect turned himself in following a major manhunt. The Bild newspaper said the man was covered in blood when he approached officers and said, “I’m the one you’re looking for.”
Authorities earlier searched a refugee shelter over the incident. Police also arrested a 15-year-old boy in connection with the incident.
During the manhunt, Solingen residents had been warned to exercise caution and be on alert while the perpetrator remained on the run. For hours after the mass stabbing, authorities had struggled to identify the attacker.
A police spokesman, Thorsten Fleiß, said the attacker specifically targeted the necks of his victims. “After evaluating the initial images, we assume that it was a very targeted attack on the neck,” he said during a press conference.
Several people were stabbed at random in the attack at a central square in the city of Solingen on Friday evening, about 25 kilometres east of Düsseldorf.
Crowds had gathered at the square in Solingen on Friday to celebrate the “Festival of Diversity,” a three-day event marking the 650th anniversary of the city’s founding. Police say the attack happened close to the stage where a musical act was performing.
Eyewitness Lars Breitzke said the attack happened just metres away from him. Speaking to local newspaper the Solinger Tageblatt, Breitzke said he realised something was wrong by the expression on the face of the singer on stage. Then, he said, “a person just metres away from me fell down.”
Friday’s attack came amid rising rates of knife crime in Germany, recently prompting the Interior Ministry to propose tightened laws to tackle the issue.
Opposition press government over refugees
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz condemned the attack as an “upsetting” and “terrible” event and will visit Solingen on Monday.
Following confirmation that the suspect was a Syrian national, Friedrich Merz, who leads the opposition centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party, called for Germany to stop admitting refugees from Syria and Afghanistan.
“It’s enough!” he wrote in a letter on his website.
Germany’s Vice Chancellor and Green Party politician Robert Habeck demanded a tightening of laws regarding knife crime. “No one in Germany needs to have a knife in a public place,” Habeck wrote in a statement posted on X, formerly Twitter.
Alice Weidel, the co-chair of Germany’s far-right, anti-immigration Alternativ für Deutschland (AfD) party, meanwhile pinned the blame solely on Germany’s migration policy. “Instead of racking our brains over the various models of knife bans, we must finally tackle the problem at its roots. Migration change immediately,” she wrote on X.
The attack is likely to further fuel anti-immigration sentiment in Germany, where the AfD has been making election gains and are hoping for further success in upcoming elections in three eastern states next month.
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