Solingen (North Rhine-Westphalia) – A man is leaning his head against the window of a bus. He is wearing a yellow raincoat. It is smeared. Is that blood? He has pulled the hood down over his face. And yet you can see a dark beard. The man in the raincoat is wearing light-colored trousers and black shoes. What kind of guy is he?
One passenger finds him strange. It is Saturday evening around 9:10 p.m. on the Solingen city bus line 695. Around 25 hours ago, the city of 160,000 inhabitants experienced a terrible act of terror: three dead, eight injured at the city festival. At the hands of a knife-wielding murderer who has been on the run ever since.
The man in the yellow raincoat has just got on the bus. Stop: Klingenstrasse. “He seemed extremely agitated, almost stumbled when he got on. He immediately stood at the window and leaned his head against it,” says the passenger. At that moment he becomes an important witness. A whistleblower.
On this Saturday evening, the witness is only a few meters away from the man in the raincoat. He takes his cell phone and quickly takes a photo. He doesn’t want to attract attention. The photo is a bit blurry, slightly shaky. But according to the police, it shows with a high degree of probability: the knife terrorist from Solingen, Issa al Hasan, 26 years old, Syrian. HE is supposed to be the man in the raincoat.
Just a few moments after the cell phone photo, the man in the raincoat gets off the bus. Stop: Entenpfuhl, around 14 minutes from the crime scene. He has traveled four stops on the bus. Now the witness dials 110: “I immediately called the police “I called and said that there was a guy on the bus who seemed suspicious to me. He had blood spatter on his rain jacket. I immediately thought that he could be the assassin we were looking for.”
Is this call the decisive clue for access?
The fact is: Only about 30 minutes after this bus ride, after this photo and after the passenger from bus 695 called the police, Issa al Hasan was arrested.
Hundreds of police officers, special forces, dogs and helicopters have been hunting him since Friday, 9:37 p.m. Now they have him!
Until now, police sources said that the murderer had turned himself in to a police patrol on Saturday evening, shortly before 11 p.m. He had previously hidden himself. Then he said that HE was the one they were all looking for. But new information paints a slightly different picture of his arrest.
In fact, the man in the yellow raincoat, who got off the bus at the Solingen-Entenpfuhl station, encountered a police patrol a short time later. An investigator has now confirmed this to BILD: “The man was noticed by police officers as he walked back and forth in the rain, as the streets were deserted at the time.”
The moment of arrest. The photo shows a policewoman holding the yellow rain cape that al Hasan had worn on the bus
The police officers speak to the man and want to know what he is doing and who he is. Issa al Hasan then admits everything!
He makes a gesture with his hands as if he wanted to stab and cut the throat. Then he points at himself.
The police officers detain him. The man has to kneel down and take off his conspicuous yellow raincoat. A photo of the arrest shows a policewoman holding the coat in her hand.
Issa al Hasan on his way to the Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe
The bus has now been secured in order to secure further blood traces. The police are still investigating where al Hasan was before the bus ride and where he got the raincoat. It is also unknown why he drove close to the scene of his terrible crime at that time.