German police arrest 26-year-old man over Solingen stabbing attack

 

German police have arrested a suspect in a stabbing rampage in the western city of Solingen that killed three people and injured eight.

The suspect, a 26-year-old Syrian man, turned himself in and admitted to the crime, Duesseldorf police and prosecutors said in a joint statement on Sunday.

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“The involvement of this person is currently under intensive investigation,” they said.

German federal prosecutors identified the Syrian man as Issa Al H., omitting his family name because of German privacy laws, and said he was suspected of being a member of ISIL (ISIS).

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The attack – claimed by ISIL, which is yet to be verified – took place on Friday evening at a festival to celebrate Solingen’s 650th anniversary.

Late on Saturday, a state official speaking on German television announced the arrest of a man whom he said authorities had been searching for in the 24 hours since the attack.

The interior minister of North Rhine-Westphalia state, Herbert Reul, told the ARD broadcaster that he was “a bit relieved” after authorities spent the day following a “hot lead” that led to the arrest.

Police spent the day conducting a manhunt, making two arrests that were likely not the perpetrator, Reul said.

“The real suspect is the one that we’ve arrested just now,” he said. The individual is being questioned and evidence was seized, he said, adding that the man was affiliated with a home for refugees that had been searched earlier in the day.

Meanwhile, German federal prosecutors have taken over the case and are investigating whether the suspect was a member of ISIL, a spokesperson for the prosecutors said.

Forensic police inspect on August 24, 2024 the area where at least three people were killed and several injured when a man attacked them with a knife in Solingen [File: Ina Fassbender/AFP]

Earlier on Saturday, a prosecutor said another person had also been arrested: a 15-year-old suspected of failing to report a criminal act.

Witnesses had allegedly seen the teen discussing the attack just before it happened with a man who could be the killer, said Markus Caspers, prosecutor of Duesseldorf, just west of Solingen.

According to the newspapers Bild and Spiegel, the suspect was a 26-year-old Syrian who arrived in Germany in December 2022 and had been granted a protected immigration status often given to those fleeing the war-torn country.

He was previously not known to the security services as an “extremist”, the outlets reported.

At its peak, ISIL controlled large stretches of territory in Iraq and Syria and carried out several deadly attacks across the world. But the group faced a territorial defeat in 2017, and its brutal rule collapsed after it lost the areas it controlled to the Iraqi government and various parties in the Syrian civil war.

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The group has previously claimed responsibility for attacks that it was not involved in, including a mass shooting in Las Vegas in 2017.

The three people killed on Friday were men aged 56 and 67 and a 56-year-old woman, officials said.

The victims had “no known ties between them”, Caspers told a news conference.

The attack occurred as thousands of people gathered in front of a stage for the first night of the three-day “Festival of Diversity”, which has now been cancelled.

Solingen is a city of some 150,000 people located between Duesseldorf and Cologne.