Police said in a statement that the suspect was a 26-year-old Syrian
Solingen, Germany:
German police said Sunday that a Syrian man has surrendered himself and confessed to killing three people and wounding eight others in a knife attack at a street festival.
The random attack as thousands of people gathered in the western city of Solingen on Friday evening has stunned Germany.
Two men, ages 56 and 67, and a 56-year-old woman were killed, officials said. Four of the injured remained in a serious condition. According to police, all victims were stabbed in the neck.
Police said in a statement that the suspect was a 26-year-old Syrian who had “surrendered himself to authorities… and declared himself responsible for the attack.”
Officers arrested a suspect on Saturday in a raid on a hostel for asylum seekers not far from the site of the attack, a police spokesman told AFP.
According to North Rhine-Westphalia Minister of the Interior Herbert Reul, the police have evidence linking the man to the knife attacks. Federal prosecutors have launched an investigation into allegations of “participation in a terrorist organization,” a spokesperson said.
According to Bild and Spiegel newspapers, the suspect arrived in Germany in December 2022 and had a protected immigration status often given to those fleeing war-torn Syria.
According to the newspapers, he was not known as an extremist among the security services.
Teen arrested
Police have also arrested a 15-year-old suspected of failing to report a criminal offense. Witnesses allegedly saw the teenager discussing the attack, said Markus Caspers, prosecutor in Düsseldorf, just west of Solingen.
The attack occurred as thousands of people gathered for the first evening of a “Festival of Diversity”, part of a series of events to mark Solingen’s 650th anniversary. The entire festival has now been cancelled.
Germany has been on high alert for extremist attacks since the Gaza war broke out on October 7 with the Hamas attacks on Israel.
German street festivals and markets have been hit before.
Twelve people were killed in a truck disaster at a Christmas market in Berlin in 2016. In May, a police officer was killed and five people were injured in a knife attack during a far-right rally in Mannheim, with an Islamist motive suspected.
The propaganda arm of the jihadist Islamic State group, Amaq, said that “the perpetrator of the attack on a gathering of Christians” in Solingen “was an Islamic State soldier.”
IS said the attack was carried out as “revenge for Muslims in Palestine and everywhere,” in an apparent reference to the Gaza conflict.
The claim could not immediately be verified, although German officials had said that “a terrorist motive cannot be ruled out.”
Interior Minister Nancy Faeser had warned this month that Germany was in “the firing line” of Islamist groups.
National and local leaders, including Chancellor Olaf Scholz, said the country was “deeply shocked” by the deaths in Solingen, a city of 160,000.
Witness Lars Breitzke told the Solinger Tageblatt newspaper that he was in the vicinity of the attack, close to the main stage, and “understood from the expression on the singer’s face that something was wrong.”
“And then someone fell a meter away from me,” said Breitzke, who at first thought it was someone who had had too much to drink.
When he turned around, he saw other people lying on the ground with pools of blood.
During a visit to the site of the tragedy, Faeser called on the country to “stay united” as she denounced “those who want to stir up hatred.”
“Let us not be divided,” she said.
Scholz’s centre-left coalition faces regional elections in the east of the country next week, where the far-right AfD is leading in the polls.
Germany took in more than a million asylum seekers between 2015 and 2016, at the height of Europe’s migrant crisis.
The influx caused great division in Germany and fueled the popularity of the AfD.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)