On the evening of 23 August 2024, a mass stabbing took place during a festival celebrating the 650th anniversary of Solingen, Germany, when a Syrian man armed with a knife killed three people and injured eight others. The public prosecutor accused the suspect of being motivated by "radical Islamist convictions".[1][2] The attacker is also suspected of being a member of Islamic State,[3] which claimed responsibility for the attack.[3][4][5]
Following the attack, a 24-hour manhunt ensued,[4][6] which ended with police arresting the suspect, whose behaviour and appearance had struck them as suspicious.[7] During the search, residents were advised to stay vigilant.[8]
The suspect, a 26-year-old Syrian Man from Deir ez-Zor, Syria,[6][4] arrived in Germany in 2022.[9] His asylum application was rejected, and although he was ordered to be deported to Bulgaria—where he had previously applied for asylum—authorities were unable to locate him, during which time he remained in Germany.[9]
The stabbing has intensified the migration debate in Germany, prompting some politicians to advocate for stricter border controls and a suspension of refugee admissions.[9] German Chancellor Olaf Scholz characterised the attack as "terrorism against us all" and stressed the need for his government to expedite repatriation and deportation.[9]
The attack occurred during an event called the Festival of Diversity (Festival der Vielfalt),[11] a three-day event from 23 to 25 August celebrating Solingen's 650th anniversary. It had been billed as turning the city center into a big "celebration mile" stretching from Neumarkt to Fronhof to Mühlenplatz.[12] The incident took place at the Fronhof, a central square and marketplace in the heart of the city, where a stage had been set up for live music performances.[10]
Prior to the stabbing, there was a 10% annual rise in knife attacks in Germany, particularly in city centers and at railway stations. Interior minister Nancy Faeser earlier in August 2024 told public broadcaster ARD that more stringent restrictions were needed on knives in public places, with exceptions only for household knives in closed packaging that have just been bought.[13]
Attack
The attack occurred around 21:40 local time (19:40 UTC). A man stabbed several people, killing three and wounding eight others,[4] in front of a music stage. All four of the severely wounded were said on 25 August to be on their way to recovery.[14]DJ Topic, performing at the time of the attack, said he had been asked by security to continue his set to prevent mass panic.[15]
Initially, authorities said they were considering the possibility of terrorism as a motive for the attack, which police believe was the work of a single attacker.[16] On 24 August, Islamic State (ISIS) released a statement through its Amaq News Agency outlet[5] on the messaging app Telegram claiming responsibility[4][5] and on 25 August through social media channels, a one-minute video of a man, who the group claimed to be the perpetrator, holding a knife and swearing an oath of loyalty to its leader.[17] This was the first time that ISIS had claimed responsibility for a terrorist attack on German soil since the 2016 Berlin truck attack.[18]
The three dead victims were two men, aged 56 and 67, and a 56-year-old woman, all from the Solingen area.[16][19] No other details on the victims have been released. Police issued a major alert and launched a manhunt. Armed officers were on site, having cordoned off large sections of the city, with barriers in place across various locations.[10]
According to the German daily Bild, heavily armed SEK units, totaling around 40 special vehicles from across North Rhine-Westphalia, were deployed to Solingen. Road junctions were blocked, and residents were advised to stay indoors and avoid the city center.[10]
Following the attack, the remainder of the festival was canceled.[4] A 15-year-old was arrested in connection with the case, with authorities stating he was seen speaking with the perpetrator moments before the attack. The teenager is not the primary suspect but is alleged to have known about the attack without reporting it to authorities.[19][20][21]
Suspect
Nearly 26 hours after the stabbing,[5] the police arrested a 26-year-old Syrian as a suspect, his clothes dirty and bloody.[3][6] Police had addressed him right after noticing his behaviour and appearance as suspicious. His whereabouts in the time between the stabbing and the arrest, and whether he had spoken to anybody and what he had done in that time remained unclear as of early September 2024.[7]
The suspect, whom the police were already searching for in connection with the attack, is a man who was born in Deir ez-Zor, Syria, and had come to Germany in December 2022. He had not been identified by authorities as an Islamic extremist prior to the attack.[6][4] A year after filing an asylum application in Bielefeld, he moved to Paderborn.[22] He had originally entered the European Union through Bulgaria, and German authorities, based on the Dublin Regulation, tried to deport him back to Bulgaria in early 2023[22] but he could not be found at his assigned refugee housing in Paderborn when police arrived there in the early hours of 5 June 2023 to pick him up, according to a report by the state refugee ministry for the state parliament from early September 2024. The report said that the suspect had been seen at lunch in the housing on 5 June; it also uncovered a previous longer absence from 18 to 24 April 2023. As the municipal immigration office in Bielefeld had not known about the latter absence, it did not consider requiring the suspect to stay in his room at night; had such a requirement been made, it would have allowed authorities to extend the deadline for his return to Bulgaria in case of a breach.[23] Because he was not known to be dangerous, authorities did not issue a warrant for his arrest after the abortive attempt at deportation.[24] After six months, in which no second attempt at deportation was made,[25] the deadline for the return had run out, so Germany was now responsible for processing his asylum claim. He showed back up a few days later and was granted subsidiary protection in late 2023 and was assigned accommodation in Solingen.[26][22]
After the arrest of the alleged perpetrator, the Public Prosecutor General took over the investigation on suspicion of a terrorist offence or politically motivated crime.[27] On 25 August, the alleged perpetrator was remanded in pre-trial custody on suspicion of murder and membership of ISIS, among other charges.[14] He was named only as Issa al H. due to German privacy laws.[14] On the same day, prosecutors stated that he "shared the radical ideology of the Islamic State extremist group" and the motive for the attack was his "radical Islamist convictions".[1][2] A team of 50 investigators supported by the Federal Criminal Police Office was working on the case as of early September 2024.[7]
Reactions
View from Solingen's Küstergasse to the beginning of Fronhof, where the Chancellor, Minister-President and others laid flowers on 26AugustA memorial for the victims
Minister of the Interior of North Rhine-Westphalia Herbert Reul, who traveled to Solingen on the night of the attack, warned against speculation about the perpetrator, saying that it was as yet impossible to say anything about him or his motives.[28] Reul, Federal Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser and North Rhine-Westphalia minister president Hendrik Wüst visited the crime scene on 24 August.[29]
Solingen's mayor, Tim Kurzbach, wrote a post about the attack on the city's Facebook page, saying that "This evening, we are all in shock, horror and great sadness in Solingen. We all wanted to celebrate our city's anniversary together and now we have to mourn the dead and injured." He also thanked all emergency services that responded to the attack.[30][31]
After the attack, the political debate about concrete consequences first centred around making the German weapons law more stringent. Vice-chancellor Robert Habeck of the Greens expressed support for such a measure, while saying it was uncertain if this could have prevented the attack. The debate shifted after it transpired that the suspect is a rejected asylum seeker.[32][14] In an email to chancellor Olaf Scholz of the SPD seen by media, Friedrich Merz, leader of the CDU/CSU, the largest opposition party, asked for radical changes in migration policy. SPD chief Lars Klingbeil asked for a slate of measures against Islamic extremism.[33] Fellow SPD chief Saskia Esken said in early September that lessons should be drawn from the attack, after previous statements by her to the extent that there was nothing much to learn from it, as the alleged perpetrator had not been known to police, had widely been criticized. Esken expressed preference for better enforcement of existing asylum legislation over tightening it. She also called for requiring social media companies to control content.[34] The far-right party Alternative for Germany blamed not only the ruling coalition but also the CDU/CSU opposition for alleged shortcomings on security, linking it with immigration even before the identity of the assailant was released.[35]
On 26 August, chancellor Olaf Scholz described the attack as "terrorism, terrorism against us all" during a visit to Solingen. He emphasised the need for his government to ensure that individuals who should not be in Germany are repatriated and deported, with a focus on accelerating the process if needed. He also committed to promptly strengthening regulations on weapon ownership.[9]
On 29 August, the German government proposed a toughening of weapons laws and asylum rules.[36][37] Two draft laws were introduced by the government on 12 September, which covered extending knife prohibitions, reducing state support to certain refugees, and extending powers of authorities in fighting terrorism.[38]
On 30 August, Germany deported 28 Afghan nationals to Afghanistan after 2 months of negotiations with Qatar as a mediator. All individuals were males and convicted criminals, and each received €1,000.[39][40]
Influenced by the stabbing, the state of Thuringia in late August granted its district governments the right to declare no-weapons zones in certain public places, and Bavaria declared in early September its intention to do the same. Similar measures had already been taken in other German states years before the stabbing.[41]
Criminologist Dirk Baier of the Zurich University of Applied Sciences warned that stricter laws were unlikely to root out knife assaults, saying that they were ineffective against young perpetrators and that there had to be enough checking personnel in the proposed weapons-ban zones. He called the stabbings a "social problem" that had to be addressed with social measures.[13] When interviewed by the press service of the Evangelical Church in Germany, social psychologist Andreas Zick of the University of Bielefeld called for a thorough analysis of the terror, a deepened analysis of potential perpetrators, a careful assessment of options for the possibility of implementation from a legal viewpoint – something that he saw as having been neglected by parties in the middle of the political spectrum in the past –, and most of all, care for the victims and their relatives. The Israel–Hamas war had, according to Zick, already increased the risk of violence in Germany and other European countries. He said that the Solingen attack would yield information on where the violence came from and which old and new ideologies played a role in this.[42]
The government measures to reduce support for rejected asylum seekers as announced on 29 August, were watered down by SPD and Green party members of the German Bundestag who apparently wanted to prevent rejected asylum seekers from becoming homeless and impoverished. After the new regulation from mid October, support can now only be stopped if there are no obstacles blocking rejected asylum seekers from leaving. After a meeting in the "Innenausschuss", an Interior ministry committee, where the changes were discussed, opposition members called the measures pointless. While a police union representative called them a mockery of the victims of Solingen.[43]
The Solingen arson attack was one of the most severe instances of racist violence in modern Germany. On the night of 28–29 May 1993, four young German men belonging to the far right skinhead scene, with neo-Nazi ties, set fire to the house of a large Turkish family in Solingen in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. Three girls and two women died; fourteen other family members, including several children, were injured, some of them severely. The attack led to violent protests by Turkish diaspora members in several German cities and to large demonstrations of other Germans expressing solidarity with the Turkish victims. In October 1995, the perpetrators were convicted of arson and murder and given prison sentences between 10 and 15 years. The convictions were upheld on appeal.
The 2015 IKEA stabbing attack occurred on 10 August when Abraham Ukbagabir fatally stabbed two people in an IKEA store in the Erikslund Shopping Center in Västerås, Sweden, as revenge for not being granted asylum in Sweden. The stabbing attracted worldwide attention. Ukbagabir was convicted of two first degree murder charges and sentenced to life in prison in December 2015.
The 2016 Munich knife attack took place on 10 May 2016 when a 27-year-old mentally disturbed man stabbed four men, one of them fatally at Grafing station in the Upper Bavarian town of Grafing, some 32 kilometres (20 mi) from Munich, southern Germany. As the knifer reportedly shouted "Allahu Akbar" while stabbing the random victims, first reactions of the German and international media as well as the general public suspected an Islamist attack. On his arrest shortly after the attack, the perpetrator proved to be a mentally disturbed, unemployed carpenter with drug problems and no known ties to Islamist organizations. In August 2017, the Landgericht München II ruled the man to not be criminally liable of the crime and committed him to a closed psychiatric ward.
On 24 July 2016, fifteen people were injured, four seriously, in a suicide bombing outside a wine bar in Ansbach, Bavaria, Germany. The bomber, identified by police as Mohammad Daleel, was a 27-year-old Syrian asylum seeker who had pledged allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, leader of the Islamic State. He was the only fatality in the incident. According to German authorities, Daleel was in contact with the Islamic State and had been planning more attacks before his backpack bomb exploded accidentally.
On 24 July 2016, a Syrian asylum seeker armed with a döner knife attacked his girlfriend and bystanders in Reutlingen, Germany, killing his girlfriend, a Polish woman, and wounding two other people in the forearm and head, before being struck accidentally by a car and arrested by police.
Crimes may be committed both against and by immigrants in Germany. Crimes involving foreigners have been a longstanding theme in public debates in Germany. In November 2015, a report that was released by the Federal Criminal Police (BKA) stated that "While the number of refugees is rising very dynamically, the development of crime does not increase to the same extent." Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière (CDU) noted that "refugees are on average as little or often delinquent as comparison groups of the local population." A 2018 statistical study by researchers at the University of Magdeburg using 2009-2015 data argued that, where analysis is restricted to crimes involving at least one German victim and one refugee suspect and crimes by immigrants against other immigrants are excluded, there is no relationship between the scale of refugee inflow and the crime rate. In 2018 the interior ministry under Horst Seehofer (CSU) published, for the first time, an analysis of the Federal Police Statistic, which includes all those who came via the asylum system to Germany. The report found that the immigrant group, which makes up about 2% of the overall population, contains 8.5% of all suspects, after violations against Germany's alien law are excluded.
The 2017 Turku attack took place on 18 August 2017 at around 16:02–16:05 (UTC+3) when 10 people were stabbed in central Turku, Southwest Finland. Two women were killed in the attack and eight people sustained injuries.
The Murder of Mia Valentin was a fatal stabbing on 27 December 2017 in the town of Kandel in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. An Afghan asylum seeker, who had been denied refugee status, was charged with the murder of his 15-year-old German former girlfriend, allegedly after she ended the relationship. The case was reported in the national and international press and sparked a political debate about the German refugee policies, especially how to deal with underage unaccompanied refugees.
On 7 March 2018, two stabbings occurred in Vienna, Austria during the evening. A man has been arrested for both attacks. On 11 March 2018, there was a separate stabbing attack at the Embassy of Iran in the city. The Austrian government hardened its asylum policy after the attacks.
On 25 March 2018, 24-year-old Vivien K. was stabbed by a Syrian migrant in Burgwedel, Germany. She received life-threatening injuries and was put into an induced coma. She woke up three days later, with broken ribs and part of her pancreas as well as her spleen removed.
The 2018 Chemnitz protests took place in Chemnitz, in the German state of Saxony. In the early morning of 26 August, after a festival celebrating the city's founding, a fight broke out resulting in the death of a German man and serious injuries to two other people. Two Kurdish immigrants, one from Iraq and the other from Syria, were named as suspects. The incident reignited the tensions surrounding immigration to Germany, which had been ongoing since 2015, and the European migrant crisis. In response, mass protests against immigration were ignited by far-right groups. The protests spawned riots and were followed by counter-demonstrations.
A mass stabbing is a single incident in which multiple victims are injured or killed with a sharp object thrusted at the victims, piercing through the skin and injuring the victims. Examples of sharp instruments used in mass stabbings may include kitchen knives, utility knives, sheath knives, scissors, katanas, icepicks, bayonets, axes, machetes and glass bottles. Knife crime poses security threats to many countries around the world.
On 20 June 2020, shortly before 19:00 BST, a man with a knife attacked people who were socialising in Forbury Gardens, Reading, Berkshire, United Kingdom. Three men died from their wounds, and three other people were seriously injured. Khairi Saadallah, a 25-year-old Libyan male refugee, was arrested shortly afterwards. He was charged with three counts of murder and three counts of attempted murder; he pleaded guilty. In January 2021, Saadallah was sentenced to a whole-life term.
On 4 October 2020, a man was killed and another injured during a knife attack in Dresden, Germany. After two weeks, the 20-years-old perpetrator was arrested, Abdullah al-H. H. - a Syrian national who had arrived in Germany in 2015 to seek asylum. He had been sentenced in November 2018 to two years and nine months imprisonment for supporting a terrorist organization and planning an attack with contacts with a militant in Yemen and working on the construction of suicide belts. He had been released from prison in September 2020. Europol classified the attack as jihadist terrorism.
The 2021 Würzburg stabbing occurred on 25 June 2021 in Würzburg, Germany. Abdirahman Jibril, a 24-year-old homeless man of Somalian nationality killed three civilians with a kitchen knife in a Woolworth store and wounded seven others. Minutes later, the police shot the suspect in his leg and arrested him. He had a history of several violent altercations since his 2015 arrival as an asylum seeker in Germany and a one day involuntary commitment into a psychiatric hospital a month before the attack. Islamist motives were suspected; he himself said the attack was 'his jihad'. Another refugee accused him to be an al-Shabaab member, who had killed civilians, journalists and police officers in Somalia, which German authorities could not confirm.
Events in the year 2024 in Germany.
On 31 May 2024 at 11:34am, a man ambushed and stabbed several people at a rally hosted by the counter-jihad and anti-Islam group Citizens' Movement Pax Europa (BPE) in the market square in Mannheim, Baden-Württemberg, Germany. He mortally wounded a police officer, who died two days later, and wounded five other people. The victims included the controversial activist Michael Stürzenberger, the main speaker at the rally. Six people were injured, including Stürzenberger and a police officer who was stabbed in the neck and died from his injuries two days later. The attack was stopped when the suspect was shot and injured by another police officer. Investigators suspect that the suspect's motive was Islamist in nature.
↑ Kriskofski, Anja; Geyer, Steven; Mendgen, Alisha (25 August 2024). "Der Schock von Solingen – und die Folgen"[The shock of Solingen – and the aftermath]. RND (in German). Archived from the original on 26 August 2024. Retrieved 26 August 2024.
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