SOLINGEN, Germany: German Chancellor Olaf Scholz pledged to tighten weapons regulations and accelerate the deportation of rejected asylum seekers after three people were knifed to death in Solingen on Friday.
A Syrian man named as Issa Al H. who had avoided deportation after a failed asylum application is in custody accused of carrying out the attack at a festival in the western German city near Dusseldorf and membership of the extremist Daesh (Islamic State).
Speaking Monday at the site of the assault, in which a further eight people were injured, Scholz characterized the incident as “terrorism.” He told reporters that stricter rules on weapons possession would apply especially to knives and they should and will be adopted “very rapidly.”
“We must also do everything possible so those people who do not have the right to remain here in Germany can be sent back,” he said, adding that a recent law introduced by his government had “massively” increased the effectiveness of deportation efforts.
“But that is not a reason by any means for us to sit on our hands,” he said. “We will look very closely at how we can further increase the numbers.”
The incident has stoked an already heated debate around immigration in Germany and prompted accusations from opposition parties that the government isn’t doing enough to prevent people entering the country illegally.
The issue has been front and center ahead of this Sunday’s elections in Saxony and Thuringia, where the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party could win the biggest share of the vote in both eastern regions.
Even so, the AfD is unlikely to become part of any regional government as rival parties have vowed to cooperate to keep it out of power — a so-called firewall similar to the one that thwarted the far right in the recent legislative election in France.
A Syrian man has been detained on suspicion of carrying out the rampage on behalf of Daesh (Islamic State) group.
Here is what we know:
Festival attacked
The attack took place at around 9:40pm (1940 GMT) on the Fronhof, a busy square in Solingen city centre. Stages and various attractions had been set up as part of celebrations to mark the city’s 650th anniversary.
The attacker struck in front of one of the stages during a concert by the group Suzan Koecher’s Suprafon, aiming for the victims’ necks, according to police. He then fled the scene.
A witness told the local daily Solinger Tageblatt that he was just a few metres away and “understood from the expression on the singer’s face that something was wrong”.
“And then, a metre away from me, a person fell,” the witness, Lars Breitzke, said.
When he turned around, he saw other people lying on the ground amid pools of blood, he added.
Two men aged 56 and 67 and a 56-year-old woman were killed in the attack and eight people were wounded, four of them seriously.
Suspect confesses
Police said on Sunday that a 26-year-old Syrian had turned himself in to the authorities and confessed to carrying out the attack.
The suspect, named as Issa Al H., managed to escape amid the panic and threw his knife into a bin, according to details published by the Bild daily that have not been confirmed by investigators.
Police have seized the knife as well as the suspect’s “blood-stained” jacket, which still contained his wallet and identity papers, Bild reported.
After the attack, the suspect reportedly took cover in a courtyard around the corner from the home for refugees where he had been living in the city centre.
He was found there during a police patrol in the pouring rain just before midnight on Saturday, Bild said.
Issa Al H. arrived in Germany in December 2022 and had a protected immigration status often given to those fleeing war-torn Syria, according to Bild and other news outlets.
High alert
German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser warned earlier this month that “the threat posed by Islamist terrorism remains high” in Germany.
The biggest danger is thought to be posed by Islamic State-Khorasan (IS-K), the same group believed to have been behind March’s deadly massacre in a Moscow concert hall.
The number of people considered Islamist extremists in Germany fell slightly from 27,480 in 2022 to 27,200 last year, according to a report from the federal domestic intelligence agency.
The AfD is running second in national polls behind the conservative CDU/CSU alliance, while Scholz’s Social Democrats are in third and their Greens coalition partners fourth.
A new far-left group, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, which also wants to curb immigration and has stronger backing in eastern Germany, is in fifth place ahead of the Free Democrats, the smallest of the three parties in the ruling alliance, in sixth.
Call to halt immigration
In a post on X on Monday, Alice Weidel, a co-leader of the AfD, called for a halt to immigration for at least five years. Wagenknecht said in a separate post on the social media site that “whoever allows uncontrolled migration will get uncontrollable violence.”
As well as membership of a terrorist organization, Issa Al H. is accused of three counts of murder and eight of attempted murder.
According to the federal prosecutor, he was attempting to kill as many what he believed to be “infidels” as possible and specifically targeted the neck and upper body of the victims.
Regional authorities in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, where Solingen is located, have also come under fire after it emerged that the suspect’s asylum request had been rejected and he should have been deported. Germany’s 16 federal states are responsible for enforcing deportation orders.
In early June, Scholz responded to mounting law and order concerns with a pledge to accelerate the process of sending immigrants who commit serious crimes back to their homelands, including Syria and Afghanistan.
A few days earlier, an Afghan-born man went on a rampage with a knife at an election rally in Mannheim and injured six people, including a 29-year-old policeman who later died.
Scholz will meet this week with officials from the state governments to discuss additional measures to tighten asylum and deportation rules, according to people familiar with the planning, who asked not to be identified discussing confidential information.
Scholz’s chief spokesman, Steffen Hebestreit, rejected a proposal from conservative opposition leader Friedrich Merz for a blanket rejection of all asylum seekers coming from Syria and Afghanistan.
Such a move would violate both the German constitution and international law, Hebestreit said at the regular government news conference in Berlin.
Sonja Kock, a spokeswoman for the interior ministry, said that the number of new arrivals to Germany is declining partly because of stricter border controls, while the number of deportations has been going up due to recently agreed stricter rules.
