German police say Syrian suspect confesses to knife rampage

SOLINGEN - German police said Sunday that a Syrian man has given himself up and confessed to killing three people and wounding eight others in a knife rampage at a street festival.

Friday's random attack amid thousands of people gathered for the festival in the western city of Solingen stunned Germany.

Two men - aged 56 and 67 - and a 56-year-old woman were killed, officials said. Four of the wounded remained in serious condition. All of the victims were stabbed in the neck, according to police.

Police said in a statement that the suspect was a 26-year-old Syrian who had "given himself up to authorities in charge of the investigation and declared himself responsible for the attack".

Officers arrested a suspect in a raid at a hostel for asylum seekers on Saturday, not far from the scene of the attack, a police spokesman told AFP.

North Rhine-Westphalia state interior minister Herbert Reul said police had evidence linking the man to the knife attacks.

According to the Bild and Spiegel newspapers, the suspect arrived in Germany in December 2022 and had a protected immigration status often given to those fleeing war-torn Syria.

He was not known to the security services as an extremist, the newspapers reported.

TEEN ARRESTED

Police have also arrested a 15-year-old suspected of failing to report a criminal act. Witnesses had allegedly seen the teen discussing the attack, said Markus Caspers, prosecutor of Duesseldorf, just west of Solingen.

The attack late on Friday took place as thousands of people gathered for the first night of a "Festival of Diversity", part of a series of events to mark Solingen's 650th anniversary.

Germany has been on high alert for extremist attacks since the Gaza war erupted on 7 October with the Hamas attacks on Israel.

German street festivals and markets have previously been hit.

A truck rampage at a Berlin Christmas market in 2016 killed 12 people. In May, a police officer was killed and five people were wounded in a knife attack at a far-right rally in Mannheim, with an Islamist motive suspected.

The jihadist Islamic State group's Amaq propaganda arm said, "the perpetrator of the attack on a gathering of Christians" in Solingen "was a soldier of the Islamic State".

IS said the attack was carried out as "revenge for Muslims in Palestine and everywhere", in an apparent reference to the Gaza conflict.

The claim could not be immediately verified, though German officials had said "a terrorist motive cannot be excluded".

Interior Minister Nancy Faeser had warned this month that Germany was in "the firing line" of Islamist groups.

National and local leaders, including Chancellor Olaf Scholz, said the country had been "deeply shocked" by the Solingen deaths.

Witness Lars Breitzke told the Solinger Tageblatt newspaper he was near the attack, close to the main 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 had too much to drink.

When he turned around, he saw other people on the ground in pools of blood.

During a visit to the site of the tragedy Faeser called for the country to "remain united" as she denounced "those who want to stir up hatred".

"Let us not be divided," she said.

Scholz's centre-left coalition faces regional elections next week in the east of the country, where the far-right AfD is leading in polls.

Germany took in more than a million asylum seekers in 2015-2016 at the height of Europe's migrant crisis.

The influx was deeply divisive in Germany and fuelled the popularity of the AfD.

Solingen is a city of some 160,000 people located between Duesseldorf and Cologne.

Up to 75,000 visitors had been expected to attend the "Festival of Diversity", which has now been cancelled.