She denounced a “brutal attack” committed around 9:40 p.m. Friday as thousands of spectators gathered in front of a stage set up in the center of Solingen, a city of some 160,000 inhabitants, for the launch of several days of festivities. “The horrible act in Solingen upsets me, it upsets our country,” declared for his part the head of state Frank-Walter Steinmeier.
Call for witnesses
“The victims and witnesses are currently being questioned,” police said early in the morning, reporting a toll of three dead and eight injured, five of them seriously. “Out of nowhere, a man armed with a knife stabbed people at random and killed them,” regional Interior Minister Herbert Reul described during a visit to the scene during the night. “Why, no one knows. We can’t say anything at the moment about the motive, about the person,” he added, calling for caution about the nature of the attack.
Investigators have appealed to the public to provide any information, including photos and videos, to help the search.
Many streets in the centre of Solingen, a town not far from Düsseldorf and north of Cologne, were cordoned off on Saturday morning, an AFP correspondent noted. The event was to celebrate the 650th anniversary of this town in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia and its cultural diversity. The festivities planned until Sunday have been cancelled.
According to the local daily Solingen Daily Newspapershortly after 10 p.m., a member of the organization came on stage to interrupt the concert. Explaining that the emergency services were trying to save the lives of people who had been attacked with knives, he asked the audience to leave the premises, the newspaper reports.
Pools of blood
“People left the square in shock, but calmly,” Philipp Müller, one of the organizers, told the newspaper. A witness also told the Solingen Daily Newspaper having been a few meters from the attack, not far from the stage, “understanding from the expression on the singer’s face that something was wrong.” “And then, a meter away from me, a person fell,” said the man, Lars Breitzke. When he turned around, he saw people lying on the ground and several pools of blood.
German authorities have been on high alert in recent years in the face of a dual terrorist threat, jihadism and right-wing extremism. In August, the Interior Minister announced that she wanted to ban knives longer than six centimetres from public spaces, with some members of the government coalition even calling for a total ban, in the face of a surge in knife attacks.
The coalition of Social Democrat Olaf Scholz faces key regional elections in the east of the country in a week, where the far-right AfD party is far ahead of the government parties.
The deadliest jihadist attack on German soil dates back to December 2016: a truck attack claimed by the Islamic State group left 12 dead at a Christmas market in the centre of Berlin. Another threat weighs on the country, embodied by the extreme right, after several deadly attacks in recent years targeting community or religious sites.
