German police arrest knife rampage suspect as IS claims attack

BERLIN

German police on Saturday arrested the suspect behind a knife rampage that left three people dead at a local festival in an attack claimed by the Islamic State group.

The assailant fled after striking in the western town of Solingen late on Friday, sparking a day-long manhunt.

"We have just arrested the true suspect," North Rhine-Westphalia region interior minister Herbert Reul said on public television late Saturday evening.

"The man we have been looking for all day has, since a short time ago, been (put) in detention," he said, adding that police had evidence to convict him.

In a statement on Telegram, IS's Amaq propaganda arm said "the perpetrator of the attack on a gathering of Christians in the city of Solingen in Germany yesterday 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 Israel's war with Palestinian militant group Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

The claim has yet to be verified. German officials have said that "a terrorist motive cannot be excluded".

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 not previously known to the security services as an extremist, the outlets reported.

A police spokesman had told AFP earlier that officers had arrested a man in a raid at a hostel for asylum seekers, not far from the scene of Friday's attack.

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.

The three people killed Friday were men of 56 and 67 years of age and a 56-year-old woman, officials said.

The victims had "no known ties between them", Caspers told a press conference.

Four of the people wounded in the attack were in a "serious" condition, officials said, revising down an earlier figure of five.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz had said the perpetrator "must be caught quickly and punished".

The attack 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.

High terror alert

Germany has been on high alert for possible Islamist attacks.

Since the outbreak of the war in Gaza on October 7, the risk of Islamist plots had "worsened considerably", Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said, warning that "the threat posed by Islamist terrorism remains high".

Jihadists have carried out several attacks in Germany in recent years, the deadliest being a truck rampage at a Berlin Christmas market in 2016 that killed 12.

In May, a police officer was killed and five people were wounded in a knife attack at a far-right rally in the city of Mannheim, with an Islamist motive suspected.

Friday's attack occurred as thousands of people gathered in front of a stage for the first night of the three-day festival.

Witness Lars Breitzke told the Solinger Tageblatt newspaper he was a few metres away from the attack, not far from the 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 lying on the ground in pools of blood.

Solingen mayor Tim-Oliver Kurzbach said the whole city was in "shock, horror and great grief".

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

"Let us not be divided", she said.

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

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

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