Police in Düsseldorf have arrested a suspect in connection with the stabbings that left three people dead and eight injured at a festival in the western German city of Solingen on Thursday night. The suspect is a 15-year-old boy, police spokesman Thorsten Fleiss said at a press conference. Police are investigating his “possible connections to the crime” while searches continue at several locations and the search for the perpetrator.
The spokesman said that two witnesses – two women – overheard a conversation about plans to commit an attack between the young man arrested and another person shortly before the crimes were committed. After the stabbings, the women contacted investigators to report it. It is still unclear whether the other person with whom the minor was chatting is the killer, said senior prosecutor Markus Caspers during the press conference.
The authorities have not ruled out the possibility that the attack was motivated by terrorism, Caspers said, because there does not appear to be any other motive and the victims were not related to each other. The deceased are two men and a woman. The president of North Rhine-Westphalia, Hendrik Wüst, described the attack as an “act of terror” at a hearing in Solingen.
More than 30 years after a right-wing extremist group started a fire that killed five people of Turkish origin, Solingen is experiencing another trauma caused by an act of violence. The city of about 160,000 inhabitants is in shock after a man stabbed three people to death and injured eight others, five of them seriously, on Friday night.
The incident occurred at around 9.45pm, when the city was celebrating the so-called diversity festival, a three-day festival to commemorate the 650th anniversary of its founding. The attack occurred right in front of one of the three stages, when a music group was playing live.
Police have launched a major operation to capture the attacker, a man whose identity and physical description have not yet been provided. The authorities have also not provided any information about the suspect as he is a minor, but the weekly The Spiegel He has announced that he is a Kyrgyz national and lives in a refugee shelter.
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The attacker managed to flee amid the confusion and panic that initially ensued after the attack. Witnesses “are receiving our professional support and we are of course questioning them in order to obtain more precise information,” a police spokesman told public broadcaster ARD. Police assume that there was only one attacker who stabbed his victims in the neck. “We have no evidence of any other people,” the same source said.
Police have asked for public collaboration to catch the attacker. An effort has been launched a web page The police have spent the night questioning the injured victims and the many witnesses to the incident. The city, known for hosting Germany’s largest knife industry, had attracted thousands of people for a weekend-long festival of fun and entertainment, but it has been cancelled.
Shortly after the attack, one of the event’s organisers, Philipp Müller, came out onto the main stage to report what had happened and to ask the attendees to calmly leave the square. Müller said that the emergency services were working to save the lives of several people seriously injured by a man with a knife who was still on the run, as can be seen in a video broadcast on social media and on television. As he made the announcement, cries of astonishment could be heard among the attendees.
The local newspaper Solinger Tageblatt The newspaper quoted an eyewitness, Lars Breitzke, who was standing in front of the main stage when the crime took place. He said he realised something was wrong when he saw the expression on the face of the singer who was performing at the time, Suzan Köcher. “Then a person fell to the ground a metre away from me,” said the witness, who at first thought it was a drunk. When he turned around, he saw other people lying on the ground and several pools of blood, the newspaper reported.
The search extends beyond the city limits; numerous roadblocks have been set up in the vicinity of Solingen and police helicopters have been combing the area overnight. The city centre remains blocked off with roadblocks and people have been asked not to approach so as not to disrupt police work. Many people have been leaving flowers and candles near the site of the attack, called Fronhof, the market square in the centre of Solingen, during the day.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said that “the attack in Solingen is a terrible event” that has “deeply disturbed” him. “We regret the deaths of the victims and we stand by their families,” he wrote. on social network X“I wish the injured a speedy recovery. The perpetrator must be quickly arrested and punished to the full extent of the law,” he added.
The incident comes just a week before regional elections (in the eastern states of Thuringia and Saxony) in which the far-right, anti-immigration party Alternative for Germany (AfD) has a chance of taking first place, according to polls. Although the origin of the attacker is unknown, the leader of AfD in Thuringia, Björn Höcke, who has been classified as an extremist by the courts, has posted a message on the social network X in which he asks: “Do you really want to get used to this? Free yourselves, put an end to the aberration of forced multiculturalism once and for all! Protect your children!”
The president of North Rhine-Westphalia has described the attack as a “most brutal and senseless act of violence” on his X account. Interior Minister Nancy Faeser has also expressed her shock. “We are deeply shocked by the brutal attack on the Solingen town festival. We are mourning the people whose lives were taken in a terrible way. My thoughts are with the families of the deceased and the seriously injured.”
The brutal Anschlag auf das Stadtfest in Solingen erschüttert uns zutiefst. Wir trauern um die Menschen, die auf furchtbare Weise aus dem Leben geissen wurden. Meine Gedanken sind bei den Familien der Getöteten und bei den Schwerverletzten. (1/2)
— Nancy Faeser (@NancyFaeser) August 24, 2024
Shortly before midnight, Mayor Tim Kurzbach said on their social networks“Tonight we are all shocked, horrified and very sad in Solingen. We wanted to celebrate the anniversary of our city together and now we have to mourn the dead and injured. It breaks my heart that there was an attack in our city. It brings tears to my eyes when I think of those we have lost. I pray for all those who are still fighting for their lives.”
Knife attacks
There has been growing concern in Germany recently about knife attacks. Earlier this month, the government announced plans to tighten rules on the possession of knives in public. The proposal put forward by Interior Minister Nancy Faeser is to reduce the maximum permitted length from 12 to six centimetres.
The trigger for this legal change was the death of a 29-year-old police officer in Mannheim last June. The officer was stabbed by an Afghan man during an attack on a far-right rally in a city square in broad daylight. The detainee, a 25-year-old man born in Afghanistan and resident in Germany since 2014, married with two children, attacked the organisers of the rally, Islamophobic activists who were preparing to hold a rally. The police officer intervened and was stabbed several times in the back of the neck.
In November 2021, another knife attack occurred on a high-speed train in Bavaria, southern Germany, leaving three people seriously injured. A 27-year-old Syrian man was arrested as the suspected perpetrator. Another attack in June of that year left three dead and several injured in Würzburg, Bavaria, after a man attacked passers-by with a knife. Police arrested a 24-year-old Somali man with a psychiatric history after shooting him in the leg to kill him.
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