German knife attack is ‘possible act of terrorism’, official says

SOLINGEN, Germany: A stabbing rampage in which a man killed three people and wounded eight others at a festival in the western German city of Solingen was “a possible act of terrorism”, an official said on Saturday (Aug 24) as the search for the unknown assailant continued.
Police said they had detained a 15-year-old suspected of being in contact with the attacker, who is still at large.
Markus Caspers, an official with the public prosecutor’s office in Duesseldorf, told an afternoon news conference that “terrorism” couldn’t be ruled out because there was no other known motive and because the victims seemed unrelated.
A police official, Thorsten Fleiss, confirmed at the same briefing that the assailant appeared to aim for his targets’ throats.
“The investigation and manhunt for possible further perpetrators and reasons for the crime are in full swing,” the police said in a statement.
The incident occurred late on Friday when the man attacked multiple people with a knife, the police said, adding that the motive remained unclear.
“The perpetrator must be quickly caught and punished to the fullest extent of the law,” Chancellor Olaf Scholz said in a post on X.
Interior minister Nancy Faeser said security authorities were doing everything they could to catch the person and investigate the background to the attack in the Fronhof, a market square in Solingen where live bands were playing.
The city was hosting a festival marking its 650th anniversary in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, which borders the Netherlands.
Police had cordoned off the square on Saturday, and passers-by placed candles and flowers outside the barriers.
The German musician who goes by the name Topic said he was playing on a nearby stage when the incident occurred. He was told about what happened but was asked to continue “to avoid causing a mass panic attack”, he posted on Instagram.
He was eventually told to stop, and “since the attacker was still on the run, we hid in a nearby store while police helicopters circled above us,” Topic wrote.
Witness Lars Breitzke told the Solinger Tageblatt newspaper he was a few metres from the attack, not far from the festival stage, and “understood from the expression on the singer’s face that something was wrong”.
“And then, a metre away from me, a person fell,” said Breitzke, who at first thought it was someone who had too much to drink.
When he turned around, he saw other people lying on the ground amid pools of blood.
Solingen mayor Tim-Oliver Kurzbach said the whole city was in “shock, horror and great grief”.
“We all wanted to celebrate our town’s anniversary together and now we have to mourn the dead and injured,” he said.
Authorities have cancelled the remainder of the weekend festival.
Fatal stabbings and shootings are relatively uncommon in Germany. The government said earlier this month it wanted to toughen rules on knives that can be carried in public by reducing the maximum length allowed.
In June, a 29-year-old policeman died after being stabbed in Mannheim during an attack on a right-wing demonstration. A stabbing attack on a train in 2021 injured several.
North Rhine-Westphalia’s interior minister, Herbert Reul, visited the scene early on Saturday. He told reporters it was a targeted attack on human life but declined to speculate on the motive.
Solingen, well known for its knife manufacturing industry, is a city of some 165,000 people.