The suspected perpetrator of the stabbings in which three people died and eight others were injured last Friday night in the city of Solingen, in western Germany, turned himself in to the German police late on Saturday, according to the Minister of the Interior of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, Herbert Reul. The suspect is the Syrian citizen Issa al H., 26 years old, who arrived at the end of 2022 in Bielefeld (Germany), where he requested asylum. A year later he was granted the protection that refugees from this country at war usually receive. When he turned himself in, his clothes were dirty and stained with blood, this newspaper reports. The authorities did not register him as an extremist.
Hours before the arrest, the Islamic State group had claimed responsibility for the attack on its Telegram account “in revenge for Muslims in Palestine and everywhere,” but without providing any evidence for its claim. However, a spokesman for the German public prosecutor’s office said on Sunday that the detainee is suspected of belonging to the Islamic State, according to Reuters.
German police had previously arrested two other people, the second of whom was arrested late on Saturday afternoon at a refugee shelter in Solingen, a police spokesman confirmed, without saying whether he was the suspect in the attack or a witness or alleged accomplice. The man arrested is 36 years old, the spokesman added, declining to give further details. “The investigation is ongoing,” he said.
Solingen had attracted thousands of people for a weekend-long festival of fun and entertainment, which was cancelled after the attack. The attack occurred at around 9.45pm when a live band was playing, while the city was celebrating the so-called festival of diversity, which commemorates the 650th anniversary of its founding. The dead are two men aged 67 and 56 and a woman aged 56.
Shortly after the attack, one of the event’s organisers, Philipp Müller, came out onto the main stage to report what had happened and to ask the attendees to leave the square calmly. The next day, on Saturday morning, police arrested a 15-year-old boy accused of failing to warn that an attack was about to take place, said Thorsten Fleiss, spokesman for the Düsseldorf police, at a press conference held at 3 p.m. on Saturday.
Fleiss said that two witnesses, two women, overheard a conversation about plans to commit an attack. The conversation took place between the young man arrested and another person shortly before the crimes were committed. After the stabbings, the women contacted investigators to report it. It is still unclear whether the other individual with whom the minor was chatting is the killer, said senior prosecutor Markus Caspers during the press conference.
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The last attack attributed to the Islamic State occurred last March in Moscow, when gunmen stormed a concert hall and killed a hundred people. On European soil, during 2023 at least six jihadist-inspired attacks occurred in Belgium, the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain and France, according to the International Observatory for Studies on Terrorism. One of the local branches of the Islamic State claimed responsibility last May for the attack in Afghanistan against a group of tourists that caused the deaths of three Spanish nationals. In Germany, the last case occurred in December 2016, when the Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack on a Christmas market in the center of Berlin that claimed 12 lives.
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