Bild: The real Solingen attacker is revealed

(ANSA) – ROME, AUGUST 25 – A little over 24 hours after the knife attack in Solingen in which three people were killed and nine others injured, a 26-year-old Syrian man has turned himself in to the police, confessing to the attack. Bild reports. In the rain and still covered in blood, the man approached the officers shortly after 11 p.m., saying: “I’m the one you’re looking for.” Shortly before, the police had raided an asylum seekers’ center, arresting another 36-year-old Syrian. But he was not “the one we had in our sights from the beginning,” North Rhine-Westphalia’s Interior Minister Herbert Reul said shortly before midnight. On Friday evening, a man stabbed random people at a celebration to mark the 650th anniversary of the founding of the town of North Rhine-Westphalia, killing three and injuring eight, five of them seriously, before disappearing into the crowd. A massive manhunt was launched immediately, leading to the first arrest this morning of a 15-year-old boy, suspected of having had contact with the perpetrator of the attack. The weapon was found in the afternoon. In the evening, officers from the German Special Operations Command (SEK) raided a residence for asylum seekers located near the site of the attack, arresting a 36-year-old Syrian man. Shortly afterwards, however, around 11 p.m., another Syrian man approached the officers on the street, handed himself in and confessed to the attack. His name is Issa Al H. and he was reportedly hiding in a courtyard. According to Spiegel, he had arrived in Germany in 2022 and had applied for asylum in Bielefeld, which he had been granted, and had so far not attracted attention as a radical Islamist. “Now we have the person we have been looking for all day,” said NRW Interior Minister Reul. “The evidence has also been seized.” It is not yet clear what role the man arrested in the reception center a few hours before the alleged knife murderer turned himself in played in the attack. (ANSA).