The man who stabbed a tourist on Friday evening at the memorial monument for the Holocaust in Berlin, is a 19-year-old Syrian refugee. That is what the German Public Prosecution Service has Saturday announced. He would have been planning for weeks to “kill Jews,” according to the OM shows statements he made to the police. That is why he also chose this location.
Around 6 pm on Friday evening, the 19-year-old man would have attacked a 30-year-old tourist from Spain with a knife, among the well-known vaulted concrete blocks of the Holocaust monument in the German capital. The Spaniard was injured and had to be operated on, but according to the OM is out of danger. The suspected perpetrator was arrested a few hours after the stabbing.
The 19-year-old wore a backpack in his arrest with a prayer rug, a Quran and the suspected murder weapon, “what suggests that the perpetrator had a religious motivation,” the OM writes. He is not known to the police and there are no indications that he has ties with (religious) organizations. He came to Germany as a single minor refugee in 2023.
Elections
The stabbing in Berlin follows just over a week after an attack in the southern German city of Munich, in which two people died and dozens of others were injured. According to the local public prosecutor, that attack also had a religious motive. The suspect, an Afghan man, came to Germany in 2016 as a single refugee.
The theme of migration has dominated the German election campaign. The attack in Munich has put that theme in the foreground even more. AfD leader Alice Weidel called the attack a terrorist attack of a criminal asylum seeker who should have already left the country, while the Public Prosecution Service is still investigating a terrorist motive. Furthermore, the perpetrator was legal in Germany and not known to the police.
On Sunday, February 23, the Germans will go to the polls.
Read also
First Solingen, now Munich: How to control the German elections