WORLD NEWS: KNIFE ATTACKER IN GERMANY KILLS TWO, INCLUDING CHILD
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A knife attacker killed a two-year-old child and a man on Wednesday in a public park in Germany, where police arrested an Afghan man as the main suspect.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz condemned the “unbelievable act of terror” on a play school group that left three more people wounded, and demanded to know why the failed asylum-seeker had been able to stay in the country.
The latest in a series of deadly knife attacks in Germany threatened to fire a new debate over immigration aherad of a general election on February 23.
The adult victim — a 41-year-old passerby — died while trying to shield the children from a man slashing at them with a “kitchen knife” in the city of Aschaffenburg at around 11:45 am (1045 GMT), Bavaria’s regional interior minister Joachim Herrmann said.
A two-year-old child of “Moroccan origin” was also killed, Herrmann told reporters at a press conference in Aschaffenburg.
Investigators believe the passerbyn had “courageously intervened to protect the other children… and was then fatally injured by the attacker”, Herrmann said.
Police said the suspect, a 28-year-old man from Afghanistan, was arrested shortly after the attack “in the immediate vicinity of the crime scene”.
Three other people were taken to hospital for treatment after the attack, among them a two-year-old Syrian.
The child suffered a knife wound to the neck, said Bavaria’s regional health minister Judith Gerlach, adding that the injuries were not “serious”.
In contrast, an adult in the group had undergone surgery after suffering multiple wounds to the chest, Gerlach said.
A kindergarten teacher also broke her arm trying to flee the attack.
Minister Herrmann said the suspect had come to the attention of authorities for violent behaviour on three separate occasions and was referred for psychiatric treatment.
The suspect had entered Germany in 2022 and unsuccessfully sought asylum. He was meant to have left late last year after offering to leave the country voluntarily, Herrmann said.
Investigations were ongoing into the motive behind the attack, although initial information pointed “very strongly in the direction of his obvious mental illness”.
A search of the suspect’s accommodation at an asylum centre had not produced “any evidence of a radical Islamist attitude”, with investigators instead finding psychiatric medication.
Germany has been rocked by a spate of high-profile attacks, which have fired a bitter debate over irregular immigration and public security.
In August, three people were killed and eight wounded in a stabbing spree at a street festival in the western city of Solingen that was claimed by the Islamic State group.
The revelation that authorities had missed the opportunity to deport the suspect, a Syrian asylum seeker, stirred outrage in Germany.
Scholz on Wednesday said that “I am sick of seeing such acts of violence occurring in our country every few weeks, by perpetrators who have actually come here to find protection here”.
Scholz said that “a false notion of tolerance is completely inappropriate here”.
“The authorities must work as hard as possible to find out why the attacker was still in Germany.”
The attack in Aschaffenburg comes as Germany is in the midst of an election campaign, after the collapse of Scholz’s coalition in November.
The chancellor’s centre-left Social Democrats currently trail in the polls behind the conservative CDU-CSU bloc and the far-right Alternative for Germany, who have both promised a crackdown on immigration.
“Things cannot go on like this,” conservative leader Friedrich Merz said on social media platform X after the attack. “We must and will restore law and order!”
The AfD’s top candidate Alice Weidel also posted a message on X urging “remigration now!” — using a term that the far right has adopted to call for the mass deportation of migrants.
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