German police say Syrian suspect confesses to knife attack

The random attack on Friday among thousands of people gathered for the festival in the western city of Solingen stunned Germany.

Two men, ages 56 and 67, and a 56-year-old woman were killed, according to authorities. Four of the injured remain in critical condition. All of the victims were stabbed in the neck, according to police.

Police said in a statement that the suspect was a 26-year-old Syrian who “had turned himself in to the authorities in charge of the investigation and declared himself responsible for the attack.”

Officers arrested a suspect during a raid on a shelter for asylum seekers on Saturday, not far from the scene of the attack, a police spokesman told AFP.

North Rhine-Westphalia state Interior Minister Herbert Reul said police had evidence linking the man to the knife attacks.

According to the Bild and Spiegel newspapers, the suspect arrived in Germany in December 2022 and had a protected immigration status often granted to those fleeing war-torn Syria.

The security services did not know him as an extremist, newspapers reported.

Police have also arrested a 15-year-old boy on suspicion of failing to report a crime. According to Markus Caspers, a public prosecutor in Dusseldorf, west of Solingen, witnesses had seen the teenager talking about the attack.

The attack on Friday night took place as thousands of people gathered for the first night of the “Diversity Festival”, part of a series of events to mark Solingen’s 650th anniversary.

Germany has been on high alert for extremist attacks since the Gaza war erupted on October 7 with Hamas attacks on Israel.

German street festivals and markets have already been affected before.

In 2016, a truck attacked a Christmas market in Berlin, killing 12 people. In May, a police officer was killed and five people injured in a knife attack at a far-right demonstration in Mannheim, with an alleged Islamist motive.

Amaq, the propaganda arm of the jihadist group Islamic State, said that “the perpetrator of the attack on a Christian gathering” in Solingen “was an Islamic State soldier.”

IS said the attack was carried out in “revenge for Muslims in Palestine and everywhere,” in an apparent reference to the Gaza conflict.

The claim could not be immediately verified, although German officials said “a terrorist motive cannot be excluded.”

Interior Minister Nancy Faeser had warned this month that Germany was “in the firing line” of Islamist groups.

National and local leaders, including Chancellor Olaf Scholz, said the country was “deeply shocked” by the Solingen deaths.

Witness Lars Breitzke told the Solinger Tageblatt newspaper that he was close to the scene of the attack, near the main stage, and that he “understood from the expression on the singer’s face that something was wrong.”

“And then, about a metre away from me, a person fell,” said Breitzke, who at first thought it was someone who had had too much to drink.

When he turned around, he saw other people on the ground in pools of blood.

During a visit to the site of the tragedy, Faeser called for the country to “stay united” and denounced “those who want to foment hatred.”

“We are not divided,” he said.

Scholz’s centre-left coalition faces regional elections next week in the east of the country, where the far-right AfD party is leading in the polls.

Germany welcomed more than a million asylum seekers between 2015 and 2016, at the height of the migration crisis in Europe.

The influx caused deep divisions in Germany and fueled the popularity of the AfD.

Solingen is a city of about 160,000 inhabitants located between Düsseldorf and Cologne.

Up to 75,000 visitors were expected to attend the now-cancelled “Diversity Festival.”