German police said on Sunday that a Syrian man has surrendered and confessed to killing three people and wounding eight others in a knife attack at a street festival.
The sudden attack, which took place as thousands of people gathered in the western city of Solingen on Friday night, has stunned Germany.
Two men aged 56 and 67 and a 56-year-old woman were killed, officials said. Four of the injured remain in critical condition. According to police, all the victims had been stabbed in the neck.
Police said in a statement that the suspect was a 26-year-old Syrian who “surrendered himself to the authorities… and declared himself responsible for the attack”.
Officers arrested a suspect on Saturday after raiding a refugee hostel not far from the site of the attack, a police spokesman told AFP.
According to Herbert Ruhl, interior minister for the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, police have evidence linking the man to a number of knife attacks. A spokesman said federal prosecutors had opened an investigation into allegations of “participation in a terrorist organisation.”
According to Bild and Spiegel newspapers, the suspect arrived in Germany in December 2022 and had protected immigration status, which is often granted to those fleeing war-torn Syria.
According to newspapers, the security services did not know him as an extremist.
Teen arrested
Police also arrested a 15-year-old boy suspected of failing to report the crime. Markus Caspers, the prosecutor in Dusseldorf, west of Solingen, said witnesses had reportedly seen the boy discussing the attack.
The attack occurred as thousands of people gathered for the first night of a “festival of diversity”, part of a series of events to celebrate Solingen’s 650th anniversary. The entire festival has now been cancelled.
Germany has been on high alert for extremist attacks since the Gaza war began with Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7.
Street festivals and markets in Germany have been affected before.
In 2016, a truck attacked a Berlin Christmas market, killing 12 people. In May, a police officer was killed and five people were injured in a knife attack at a right-wing rally in Mannheim that was suspected to have an Islamist motive.
The Amaq propaganda arm of the jihadist Islamic State group said the “perpetrator of the attack on a gathering of Christians” in Solingen was “a soldier of the Islamic State”.
IS said the attack was carried out as “revenge for the Muslims in Palestine and elsewhere”, an apparent reference to the Gaza conflict.
The claim could not be immediately confirmed, although German authorities said a “terrorist motive cannot be ruled out”.
Interior Minister Nancy Fieser warned this month that Germany was “under attack” by Islamist groups.
National and local leaders, including Chancellor Olaf Scholz, said the deaths in Solingen, a city of 160,000, had “deeply shocked” the country.
Eyewitness Lars Breitzke told the Solinger Tageblatt newspaper that he was near the attack, near the main 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 also lying on the ground soaked in blood.
During a visit to the site of the tragedy, Fesser called on the country to “remain united” and condemned “those who seek to spread hatred.”
“We should not be divided,” he said.
Scholz’s left-wing coalition faces regional elections next week in the east of the country, where the far-right AfD is 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.)
