The suspected perpetrator of the stabbings that left three people dead and eight others injured on Friday evening in the western German city of Solingen turned himself in to German police late on Saturday, North Rhine-Westphalia Interior Minister Herbert Reul confirmed in the early hours of the morning. The suspect is Syrian citizen Issa al H., 26, who arrived in the country in 2022 and was residing there on a temporary refugee permit. When he turned himself in, he was wearing the same clothes he allegedly wore in the murders, dirty and stained with blood. The authorities did not register him as an extremist.
Hours before the arrest, the Islamic State had claimed responsibility for the attack on its Telegram account “in revenge for Muslims in Palestine and everywhere.” A spokesman for the German public prosecutor’s office, which has taken over the investigation, said on Sunday that the detainee is suspected of belonging to this terrorist group. His relationship with this organisation is being investigated “thoroughly,” he added. On Sunday afternoon, the man was placed in preventive detention after an investigating judge at the Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe issued an arrest warrant against him. He is accused of belonging to a terrorist organisation and three counts of murder, among others.
Issa al H. was to be deported last year, according to the weekly The SpiegelThe man arrived in Germany in December 2022 and applied for asylum at the Bielefeld branch of the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF). Since he had entered European territory via Bulgaria, the authorities in Sofia were responsible for him under the European asylum system. Berlin submitted an application to Bulgaria for asylum, which accepted him.
However, the deportation attempt failed in June 2023, the magazine explains. The authorities were unable to find him at the refugee centre where he was staying. He had fled. Nevertheless, at the end of 2023, Germany granted the man, born in the Syrian city of Deir al Sor, the subsidiary protection that refugees from the country in civil war usually receive.
Two more arrests
German police had previously arrested two other people, the second of whom was arrested late on Saturday afternoon at a refugee shelter in Solingen. The man arrested is 36 years old and his relationship to the suspected perpetrator of the stabbings is unknown. A 15-year-old boy was also arrested in the morning on charges of knowing that an attack was going to take place and not alerting the authorities.
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The knife attack took place at around 9.40pm on Friday in a central square in the city of Solingen in North Rhine-Westphalia. The municipality, with a population of 165,000, had gathered thousands of people for a festival of diversity to mark the 650th anniversary of its founding. Concerts and other festive activities were scheduled throughout the weekend. While a live band was playing on the main stage, a man began to indiscriminately attack the audience with a knife pointed at their necks. He killed three people, two men aged 67 and 56 and a woman aged 56. Eight others were injured, five of them seriously.
The attacker managed to flee in the confusion and panic that followed the attack. Police began questioning witnesses and the injured and quickly realised that it was a single attacker. A large-scale operation was launched to try to locate him with the help of special forces and several helicopters. Access roads to Solingen were closed and checkpoints were set up throughout the city, but in the end it was the suspect who made his way to a police patrol car and turned himself in late on Saturday. Police have found a weapon that could have been used in the crime and are analysing it for DNA.
Solingen residents have begun to lay flowers and candles in memory of the victims at the site of the attack in the centre of the town. “We will not allow ourselves to be divided at times like this; we will remain united. We will not allow such a terrible attack to divide society,” said Interior Minister Nancy Faeser on Saturday evening during a visit to Solingen. The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party is trying to capitalise on the attack a week before regional elections in the eastern states of Thuringia and Saxony, where it has a chance of coming first according to polls.
When the origin of the attacker was still unknown, AfD leader Björn Höcke, who was accused by the courts of being an extremist and convicted of using Nazi slogans, posted a message on X in which he asked: “Citizens of Thuringia, Germans, do you really want to get used to this? Free yourselves, put an end to the aberration of forced multiculturalism! Protect your children!” He then called for “voting for change” and “sending the parties responsible for this into the desert.” AfD youth have been calling on social media for protests against immigration in Solingen.
The stabbings have brought the debate on security and immigration back to the fore in Germany. The leader of the opposition, Christian Democrat Friedrich Merz, has harshly criticised the coalition government of Social Democrats, Greens and Liberals for spending weeks debating how to ban carrying knives in public. The increase in knife attacks in recent months had led the Interior Minister to announce a tough move and a ban, among other things, on carrying knives with a blade longer than six centimetres (currently the limit is 12).
The problem is not the knives, “but the people who walk around with them,” the opposition leader said, according to the Frankfurter AllgemeineIn most cases, these are refugees, and most of the crimes are motivated by Islamism, said Merz, who called for no more refugees from Syria and Afghanistan to be accepted and for the mass deportation of those already in Germany who have no right to remain in the country to begin.
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