AGAttack in Germany. Three people died and four were seriously injured in a knife attack last night during a town festival in Solingen, in western Germany. The man, armed with a knife, began to attack the crowd and then ran away after being injured by the police. The announcement, in a festive atmosphere for the celebration of the ‘Festival of Diversity’ for the 650th anniversary of the city in North Rhine-Westphalia, was made by the organizers, on stage, in front of an astonished audience and unaware of what had happened. At the moment it is ongoing a “major operation” to try to find the alleged culprit a Dusseldorf police spokesman told AFP. “The attacker stabbed people at random with a knife,” Alexander Kresta, a spokesman for Wuppertal police, told the Bild tabloid. The suspect is probably an Arab man, and the police are not ruling out a terrorist motive.
A young man arrested, could be the attacker
In the morning, news spread that a young man had been arrested as a suspect in the massacre. The German newspaper Build reports that the young man arrested by the Special Task Force (STF) is not the knife attacker responsible for the deadly attack in Solingen. According to information gathered by Build, the person arrested at his parents’ home and questioned for several hours is a younger man whose appearance does not match the description of the perpetrator given by witnesses on the spot. According to the identikit released, the stabber is a man of about 1.70 meters, with a not too thick beard, dressed in black and wearing a hat.
The authorities responsible have not yet made an official statement on the ongoing manhunt. The police and the attorney general have announced that they will comment on the attack this afternoon at the Wuppertal police headquarters. At 3 p.m., investigators will hold a press conference together with the mayor of Solingen “to provide information on the police operation and the current status,” according to an official statement issued by the authorities.
After the attack, the scene was “largely cordoned off” and the festival, which was supposed to last until Sunday, was interrupted. About 75,000 people were expected to attend the event. “Tonight we are all in a state of shock, horror and great sadness in Solingen. We all wanted to celebrate the anniversary of our city together and now we have dead and injured to mourn,” Mayor Tim-Oliver Kurzbach wrote on the city’s website. Solingen, a city of more than 150,000 inhabitants, is located not far from Dusseldorf and north of Cologne. “It breaks my heart that an attack has taken place in our city. I have tears in my eyes thinking about those we have lost. I pray for all those who are still fighting for their lives,” Kurzbach added.
According to the reconstruction made by the local newspaper Solinger Tageblatt, shortly after 10 p.m., a member of the organization went on stage to interrupt the demonstration that began in the evening with a light show accompanied by concerts in a town square. The organizer said that the rescuers were trying to save the lives of several people. The thousands of visitors followed his call to leave the premises peacefully, the newspaper reported. “The atmosphere is spooky,” described the journalist who covered the event. “People left the square shocked, but calmly,” Philipp Muller, one of the organizers, told the newspaper. A witness also told the Solinger Tageblatt that he was just a few meters from the attack, not far from the concert stage, “and could tell from the singer’s facial expression that something was wrong.” “And then, a meter away from me, a person fell,” the man said, explaining that he initially thought it was a drunk person.
In recent years, German authorities have remained on high alert in the face of the dual terrorist threat of jihadism and right-wing extremism. The deadliest jihadist attack on German soil occurred in December 2016, when a truck-ram attack claimed by the Islamic State group killed 12 people at a Christmas market in central Berlin. At the end of May, a knife attack in Mannheim against an anti-Islamic demonstration was carried out by a 25-year-old Afghan who had arrived in Germany in 2014. The incident killed a police officer and injured five others.