German police on Saturday arrested the suspected killer of a knife attack at a street festival that left three people dead. The Islamic State group has claimed responsibility for the attack.
The unidentified attacker fled after the attack in the western city of Solingen late Friday night, leading to a search for him throughout the day.
“We have arrested the real suspect,” Herbert Ruhl, the interior minister for the North Rhine-Westphalia region, said on public television late Saturday.
“The man we have been looking for all day has been in custody for some time now,” he said, adding that the police have found evidence to convict him.
In a statement on Telegram, IS’s Amaq propaganda arm said that “the perpetrator of the attack on a gathering of Christians in the German city of Solingen yesterday was a soldier of the Islamic State”.
IS said the attack was carried out as “revenge for Palestine and Muslims everywhere”, an apparent reference to Israel’s war with the Palestinian group Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
The claim has not yet been confirmed. German authorities had earlier said that a “terrorist motive cannot be ruled out” behind the act.
A police spokesman earlier told AFP that officers had arrested a man after raiding a refugee hostel a short distance from the site of Friday’s attack.
Earlier Saturday, a prosecutor said a first person had been arrested: a 15-year-old suspected of failing to report a criminal act.
Markus Caspers, prosecutor in Dusseldorf, west of Solingen, said witnesses had reportedly seen the teenager discussing something with a man who could be the killer just before the incident.
The dead included men aged 56 and 67, and a 56-year-old woman, officials said.
“The victims were completely unknown and there was no connection between them,” Caspers said at a press conference.
Officials said four of the injured were in “critical” condition, down from earlier estimates of five.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz said the culprit “must be caught quickly and punished”.
The attacker struck as thousands of people gathered for the first night of a “Festival of Diversity,” part of a series of events celebrating Solingen’s 650th anniversary.
High terrorism alert
A high alert has been issued for potential Islamist attacks in Germany following a series of atrocities.
Interior Minister Nancy Fesser said the threat of Islamist plots had “increased significantly” since the start of the war in Gaza on 7 October, warning that “the threat posed by Islamist terrorism remains high”.
Jihadists have carried out a number of attacks in Germany in recent years, the deadliest being a truck attack on a Berlin Christmas market in 2016 that killed 12 people.
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 that was suspected to have Islamist motives.
The killing began on Friday as thousands of people gathered in front of the stage for the first night of the three-day festival.
Eyewitness Lars Breitzke told the Solinger Tageblatt newspaper that he was a few metres away from the attack, not far from the stage, and that “he knew from the singer’s facial expression 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.
When he turned around, other people were lying on the ground soaked in blood.
Solingen Mayor Tim-Oliver Kurzbach said the entire city was in “shock, fear and deep mourning”.
Fesser called on the country to “remain united” while visiting the site of the tragedy, condemning “those who spread hatred.” “We must not be divided,” he said.
knife series
Solingen is a city of about 150,000 people located between Düsseldorf and Cologne.
The “celebration of diversity” was expected to attract 75,000 visitors.
Philipp Müller, one of the organisers, told the newspaper that after the attack “people left the scene in shock but calmly.” He added that the rest of the festival was cancelled.
Scholz’s left-wing coalition faces regional elections next week in the east of the country, where the right-wing AfD is strongly leading in the polls.
Germany took in more than one million refugees in 2015–16, at the height of Europe’s migrant crisis.
The arrival was extremely divisive in Germany and led to a surge in 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.)
