German Diversity Festival mass stabbing

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At least three people have been killed and four are seriously wounded, German police have said, after an attack at a festival in the city of Solingen in the country’s west on Friday night.

Police said the weapon was believed to be a knife.

No one has been arrested and police said they had deployed a “large contingent” including a helicopter to search for the male assailant who fled the scene. Police declined to discuss a possible motive or speculate about the identity of the suspect.

Federal health minister Karl Lauterbach said he hoped “rescue teams can save the wounded who are still alive and that police can catch the cowardly and pathetic perpetrator”.

Regional premier Hendrik Wüst, who arrived at the scene early on Saturday, posted earlier on X that “All of North Rhine-Westphalia stands with the people in Solingen, above all with the victims and their families,” he said, expressing “huge thanks to the many rescue workers and our police who are in these minutes fighting for people’s lives”.

The attack happened at an event marking the city’s 650th anniversary and billed as a festival of diversity that began on Friday and was supposed to run through to Sunday. Around 10,000 people attended, many gathering around a stage with live music on the Fronhof market square in the city centre.

Most of those wounded are believed to have been attacked directly front of the stage, the daily Bild reported, adding that the man appeared to target the throats of his victims.

A police spokesperson said emergency services had received several calls at about 9.30pm with witnesses reporting that “an unknown person armed with a knife wounded several people at random”.

“Many witnesses are in a state of shock and are receiving care and giving their statements,” he said. “We hope to receive information about the assailant, particularly his appearance, so that we can make the manhunt more targeted.”

He said the information compiled so far was “very thin”.

The local Solinger Tageblatt newspaper reported that authorities called on people to leave central Solingen and that one of the festival organisers, Philipp Müller, said on a stage that emergency workers were fighting for the lives of nine people.

Rolling news channel NTV showed a video of Müller asking the crowd not to panic and to be careful leaving the premises because the attacker was still at large.

Witnesses said that people remained calm as they left the scene and media images later showed that the premises were empty apart from police and emergency vehicles. Armed officers were controlling the perimeter.

Solingen has about 160,000 inhabitants and is located near the bigger cities of Cologne and Düsseldorf. Festival organiser Mueller later told the Tageblatt that the rest of the festival would be cancelled. “We’ve just informed all the artists and stand operators,” he said.

Mayor Tim-Oliver Kurzbach said the city was “in shock, horror and great sadness” at the attack.

“We all wanted to celebrate our city’s anniversary together and now we have to mourn the deaths and injuries.

“It breaks my heart that there was an attack on our city. I have tears in my eyes when I think of those we have lost. I pray for all those who are still fighting for their lives.

The attack occurred amid a heated political debate about rising knife violence in German cities.

In May, German police shot and wounded a man who injured six people in a knife attack on a rightwing demonstration in the south-western city of Mannheim. Among the victims was a 29-year-old policeman who intervened who was fatally stabbed.

What we know so far
Here’s everything we know so far about last night’s knife attack in Solingen, following this afternoon’s police press conference and confirmation that a 15-year-old is in custody in relation to the attack.

A 15-year-old has been arrested in relation to an attack that killed three people and injured eight at a diversity festival in the western German city of Solingen, police said.

Terrorism has not been ruled out as a motive. Prosecutor Markus Caspers said that police are looking at terror, saying that there is no other obvious motive and that the attacker appears to be unknown to the victims.

It is not known if the 15-year-old was the attacker. German media have reported that the teenager is suspected of speaking to the attacker prior to the incident.

The three people that were killed were two men, aged 67 and 56, and a woman, 56.
Eight others were injured, four are fighting for their lives, police said.

Police said that they found “multiple knives” in the area and were looking at which, if any, were used in the attack.

The stabbings happened during a festival of diversity to mark the city’s 650th anniversary, which began on Friday and was supposed to run through to Sunday.

Witnesses alerted police shortly after 9.30pm on Friday night to an unknown attacker having wounded several people with a knife in the city’s central square, the Fronhof.

Authorities cancelled the remainder of the weekend festival. Other festivals scheduled for this weekend in the area have also been cancelled.

The German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, said that the perpetrator must be caught quickly and punished to fullest extent of the law.

A suspect in a Friday night knife attack in Germany that killed three people and wounded eight others has been arrested, officials said Saturday.

The Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the attack in the western German city of Solingen, where a celebration of the city’s anniversary had been taking place, officials said. Four of the six severely injured are still in life-threatening condition.

The state interior minister of North-Rhine-Westphalia, Herbert Reul, confirmed during a live TV interview Saturday that the alleged attacker has been arrested and that pieces of evidence were found.

He would not share further details saying that the investigation is ongoing and that the suspect is being currently questioned. He added that police had followed leads to this individual throughout the day.

Reul confirmed that the suspect, based on his current knowledge, had stayed at the refugee shelter that was searched earlier. He did not say that the arrest took place there.

Düsseldorf police, which are leading the investigation, also confirmed the suspect's arrest but could not provide additional information, also citing the ongoing investigation.

The suspect's identity has not been released.

This was the third arrest today in connection with the attack — the other was a 15-year-old and a man — police said they did not believe either of them were the attacker but both were questioned.

Investigators believed the 15-year-old, who was detained Saturday morning, may have had prior knowledge of the attack. Two witnesses told police after the attack that the 15-year-old had a conversation with another person about plans for an attack.

The Islamic State-run Amaq news agency released a statement Saturday saying the attacker targeted Christians and is a “soldier of the Islamic State” who carried out the attack “to avenge Muslims in Palestine and everywhere.”

Markus Röhrl, Wuppertal police president, said during a news conference Saturday that prior to the festival there was no concrete threat.

German DJ Tobias Topic wrote on Instagram that security personnel asked him to continue playing his set even as the attack was unfolding in order to prevent mass panic. He said he kept playing, "even though it was incredibly hard."

He added that the music was stopped after about 15 minutes, and that he hid with others in a nearby store while police helicopters circled above.

f**k, lol not sure if I'd prefer a mass stabbing or mass shooting, idk both sound awful so I think I prefer neither. But anytime I go into a store I make sure to sort of see where all the potential exits or hiding places are just in case of a violent crazy person.

German police said they were holding a 26-year-old Syrian man in custody on Sunday after a knife attack in the city of Solingen in which three people were killed and eight injured, adding that they were looking into the suspect's possible links with Islamic State.

The suspect turned himself in late on Saturday and admitted to the crime, Duesseldorf police and prosecutors said in a joint statement early on Sunday.

German federal prosecutors identified the Syrian man as Issa Al H., omitting his family name because of German privacy laws, and said he was suspected of being a member of Islamic State.

Prosecutors said "due to his radical Islamist convictions" he tried to kill as many people as possible that he considered to be non-believers, stabbing them repeatedly in the neck and upper body.

Friedrich Merz, a prominent politician who leads the opposition, centre-right CDU party, said the country should stop admitting further refugees from Syria and Afghanistan.
"It's enough!" he said in a letter on his website.

The suspect came from a home for refugees in Solingen that was searched on Saturday, North Rhine-Westphalia's interior minister, Herbert Reul, said.

Der Spiegel magazine, citing unidentified security sources, said the suspect had moved to Germany late in 2022 and sought asylum.

The Islamic State group described the man who carried out the attack as a "soldier of the Islamic State" in a statement on its Telegram account on Saturday.

On Sunday, the group posted two clips on its Telegram account of what it said was the attacker. The first purportedly showed the masked man pledging allegiance to the Islamic State leader, and the second, in which his face was blurred, allegedly showed him speaking moments before the attack.

Hendrik Wuest, premier of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia where Solingen is located, on Saturday described the attack as an act of terror.

Germany's Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) has said there have been around a dozen Islamist-motivated attacks since 2000. One of the biggest was in 2016, when a Tunisian drove a truck into a Christmas market in Berlin, killing 12 and injuring dozens.

"The risk of jihadist-motivated acts of violence remains high. The Federal Republic of Germany remains a direct target of terrorist organizations," the BKA said in the report earlier this year.