BERLIN – The suspect in a stabbing attack at Berlin's Holocaust Memorial that seriously injured a Spanish tourist is a Syrian refugee who apparently wanted to kill Jews, investigators said Saturday.
The 19-year-old suspect was arrested on Friday evening, nearly three hours after the attack, when he approached officers with blood on his hands and clothes.
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Police and prosecutors said in a statement that the victim sustained life-threatening injuries to the neck when he was attacked with a knife. The 30-year-old underwent an emergency operation and was put into an artificial coma for a while, and his life is no longer in danger, they added.
The suspect arrived in Germany in 2023 as an unaccompanied minor and successfully applied for asylum, investigators said. He lives in Leipzig.
The attack took place two days before a German national election in which migration has become a top issue, pushed to the forefront by five deadly attacks involving immigrants over the past nine months.
The investigation so far points to a link between the attack and the conflict in the Middle East, police and prosecutors said. They added that evidence so far, particularly from what he told police in questioning, suggests that he had decided in the last few weeks to kill Jews. That was apparently why he chose to mount the attack at the memorial dedicated to the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust.
At the time of his arrest, he was carrying a backpack containing a prayer mat, a Quran, a sheet with verses from the Quran as well as Friday's date, and the knife apparently used in the attack.
Investigators were working to determine whether the suspect suffered from mental illness. They said he was not previously known to police or judicial authorities in Berlin.
He is under investigation on suspicion of attempted murder and bodily harm.
Interior Minister Nancy Faeser described the attack as “an abhorrent and brutal crime” and said that “we will use all the means at our disposal to deport violent criminals to Syria again.”
In a separate case, police in the neighboring state of Brandenburg said they arrested an 18-year-old Russian national on Thursday on suspicion of preparing a politically motivated attack in the German capital.
German news agency dpa, which cited unidentified security sources, reported that the intended target was the Israeli Embassy. It said that the suspect, a Chechen, apparently was planning to leave Germany to join the Islamic State group. On Saturday, a suspicious object resembling explosives was found during a related search of an apartment in Potsdam and taken away to be defused elsewhere, police said.