German police on Saturday stepped up their search for a man who stabbed three people to death and injured eight others during a street festival in the city of Solingen.
Police closed off the center of Solingen after the attack on the city’s “festival of diversity” on Friday night. A police statement said five of the injured were in “serious” condition.
According to an AFP journalist, special forces were assisting security personnel in the city centre, while a helicopter was flying overhead.
“Our security authorities are making every effort to capture the perpetrator of this “appalling act”, Interior Minister Nancy Fesser said, while Chancellor Olaf Scholz said he must be “caught quickly and punished”.
Thousands of people had gathered in front of a stage on the first night of a “Festival of Diversity,” part of a series of events celebrating Solingen’s 650th anniversary, when the killing began.
“An unidentified man attacked several people with a knife at around 9.40 pm (1940 GMT),” said a police statement in the nearby city of Dusseldorf.
“Police are currently searching for a large number of perpetrators,” it said, urging witnesses to send photos, videos and other information about the attack.
‘A person fell down’
“Suddenly, a man armed with a knife attacked people, killing them,” regional interior minister Herbert Ruhl said, commenting from the scene.
“Why? Nobody knows. We can’t say anything about the motive right now,” he said.
Eyewitness Lars Breitzke told the Solinger Tageblatt newspaper that he was a few metres away from the attack, not far from the festival’s stage, and that “he knew from the expression on the singer’s face that something was wrong.”
“And then, a man fell a meter away from me”, said Breitzke, who at first thought it might be someone who had drunk too much alcohol.
When he turned around, other people were lying on the ground soaked in blood.
In a statement, Solingen Mayor Tim-Oliver Kurzbach said the entire city was in “shock, fear and deep mourning.”
“We all wanted to celebrate the anniversary of our city together and now we have to mourn the dead and the injured,” he said.
‘Cruel and senseless’
“It breaks my heart to learn that our city was attacked. When I think of the people we have lost, tears come to my eyes. I pray for all those who are still fighting for their lives,” he said.
Hendrik Wüst, the prime minister of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, also expressed his “shock and sadness” in a post on the social media platform X.
“The most brutal and senseless act of violence has struck at the heart of our state,” he said.
“The whole of North Rhine-Westphalia stands with the people of Solingen, especially the victims and their families.”
Solingen is a city of about 150,000 people located between Düsseldorf and Cologne.
People gathered in the city on Friday evening on the first day of the three-day “Festival of Diversity”.
It said music, street theatre, variety shows and comedians would be performed in the city centre and several other areas.
It was expected to attract over 75,000 visitors.
Festival canceled
Solinger Tageblatt said one of the festival organisers came on stage and announced that the festival was cancelled.
The newspaper reported that thousands of people evacuated the area, and a reporter at the scene described the atmosphere as “haunting”.
“People left the scene in shock, but calmly,” Philipp Mueller, one of the organisers, told the newspaper.
Mueller said the remainder of the festival would also be canceled.
There have been a number of knife attacks in Germany over the past 12 months, and the government has promised to crack down on knife crime.
In May, a police officer was killed and five people were injured in a knife attack at a right-wing rally in the city of Mannheim.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
