‘RANDOM’ STABBING SPREE AT FESTIVAL IN GERMANY LEAVES 3 DEAD, OTHERS INJURED: REPORT

The attack occurred shortly before noon in a park in Aschaffenburg, a city of about 72,000 inhabitants. Bavaria’s most sensible security official, Joachim Herrmann, claimed that the attacker attacked the boy, who was part of a daycare organization, with a kitchen knife.

He said that the two-year-old boy, of Moroccan origin, was murdered, as well as a 41-year-old German who was passing by and who seemed to have intervened to protect the other children. Bavarian authorities said two adults and a two-year-old Syrian girl were injured and taken to hospital for treatment, and that neither of their lives were in danger.

Other bystanders chased the suspect and arrested him 12 minutes after the attack, Herrmann said.

Emergency vehicles are seen near the crime scene in Aschaffenburg, Germany, Wednesday, January 22, 2025, where two other people were killed in a stabbing attack. (Ralf Hettler/dpa AP)

He said the suspect, a 28-year-old Afghan national, had come to authorities’ attention at least three times because of acts of violence. On each occasion, he was sent for psychiatric treatment and later released.

The suspect is believed to have arrived in Germany in November 2022 and applied for asylum in early 2023, Herrmann said. On December 4, he told the government that he would leave the country voluntarily and would seek documents from the Afghan consulate. A week later, the German government officially closed the asylum procedure and asked him to leave.

Police will work in the coming days to identify his motive, Herrmann said, adding that suspicions point to his psychiatric illness. An initial search of his room in a refugee house revealed no evidence of his radical Islamic views and only revealed medications tailored to his psychiatric treatment, he said.

The attack is politically sensitive a month before Germany’s national election.

Scholz issued a strong message condemning what he called “an incomprehensible act of terror”.

“I am tired of such acts of violence happening here every few weeks — by perpetrators who came to us to find protection here,” he said. “Mistaken tolerance is inappropriate here. Authorities must clear up at high pressure why the attacker was still in Germany at all.”

This will have to have “immediate consequences; it is not enough to talk,” Scholz added. He did not specify.

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Following a knife attack by an Afghan immigrant in Mannheim in May that left a police officer dead and four more people injured, Scholz vowed that Germany would start deporting criminals from Afghanistan and Syria again. He vowed to step up deportations of rejected asylum-seekers following a knife attack in Solingen in August in which a suspected Islamic extremist from Syria is accused of killing three people.

At the end of August, Germany deported Afghan nationals to their homeland for the first time since the Taliban returned to power in 2021.

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