German stabbing attack may be terrorism – prosecutors
Terrorism could be the motive behind the deadly stabbing attack in the German city of Solingen on Friday night, prosecutors have said.
Just before 10pm a knifeman assaulted spectators at a Festival of Diversity dedicated to the 650th anniversary of the city. Three people were killed in the attack and eight others wounded, including four seriously, while the perpetrator was able to flee the scene amid the panic.
During a press-conference on Saturday, Markus Caspers from the counter-terrorism section of the public prosecutor’s office said that the attacker has not been tracked down yet and that the manhunt continued.
The exact motive for the assault remains unclear, but the investigators do not rule out a “terrorist-motivated offense” due to the fact that the victims “were not related to each other,” he stressed.
Caspers also confirmed earlier media reports that a teenage boy had been arrested in connection with stabbing. However, he stressed that this person, a 15-year-old, was not the suspect.
According to the prosecutor, the teen is believed to have known about the planned attack but did not inform the authorities about it. Two female witnesses have claimed that they overheard him speaking with another person and discussing violent actions similar to the ones that happened later, he said.
Thorsten Fleiss from the German police, who was the chief of operations on Friday night, told journalists that the officers were conducting searches and other investigative activities throughout the whole western state of North Rhine Westphalia, where Solingen is located.
Following the attack, the police found “multiple knives” not far from the scene and were looking into whether any of these were used in the stabbing, he said.
Investigators also lack video footage of the perpetrator, the officer added, asking the public to share any information on the attack with the law-enforcement agencies instead of posting it on social media.
It is “a great challenge to bring together the evidence and the witness statements and generate an overall picture” of what happened during the Festival of Diversity, Fleiss said.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz described the attack as a “terrible event,” in a post on X (formerly Twitter) on Saturday. “The perpetrator must be captured quickly and punished to the full extent of the law,” he said.
Earlier this month, German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser called for a ban on carrying knives with a blade longer than six centimeters (nearly 2.4 inches) in public, as a measure to deal with an increase in stabbing attacks in the country.
