Two people were killed, including a two-year-old child, and three others were injured in a stabbing Attack in Bavaria Wednesday. The suspect, a former asylum seeker who was supposed to leave Germany, was arrested.
Chancellor Olaf Schulz He said the authorities must explain why the suspect remained in the country. He said the attack, which occurred a month before national elections in which curbing illegal immigration is a major issue, must have consequences.
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The attack occurred shortly before noon in a park in the city of Aschaffenburg, which has a population of about 72,000 people. Joachim Herrmann, Bavaria's chief security official, said the attacker attacked the boy, who was among a group of kindergarten children, with a kitchen knife.
The 2 year old said Moroccan origin He was killed along with a 41-year-old German man who was passing by and apparently intervened to protect the other children. Officials in the state of Bavaria said that two adults and a two-year-old Syrian girl were injured and taken to hospital for treatment, and none of them's lives were in danger.
Some bystanders chased the suspect and he was arrested 12 minutes after the attack, Herman said.
Rescue vehicles are seen near the crime scene in Aschaffenburg, Germany, Wednesday, January 22, 2025, where two people were killed in a knife attack. (Ralf Heitler/DPA via AP)
He added that the suspect, a 28-year-old Afghan national, had come to the attention of the authorities at least three times due to acts of violence. Each time, he was sent for psychiatric treatment and later released.
Hermann said he believed the suspect arrived in Germany in November 2022 and applied for asylum in early 2023. On December 4, he told authorities that he was leaving the country voluntarily and would request papers from the Afghan consulate. A week later, German authorities officially closed the asylum procedures and asked him to leave.
Herman said that the police will work in the coming days to determine his motives, adding that suspicions so far indicate that he suffers from a mental illness. He said that the first search of his room in a refugee home did not find any evidence that he had extremist Islamic views, and only revealed medication consistent with his psychological treatment.
The attack is politically sensitive, a month before the national elections in Germany.
Schulz issued a strongly worded statement condemning what he described as an “incomprehensible terrorist act.”
“I am tired of these acts of violence that happen here every few weeks, by the perpetrators who come to us looking for protection here,” he said. “False tolerance is not appropriate here. The authorities must explain, under great pressure, why the attacker remained in Germany at all.”
Schultz added that this should lead to “immediate consequences – it's not enough to talk.” He did not go into details.
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Following a knife attack carried out by an Afghan migrant in Mannheim last May, which killed a police officer and injured four others, Schulz pledged that Germany would begin deporting criminals from Afghanistan and Syria again. He pledged to step up deportations of rejected asylum seekers following a knife attack in Solingen last August, in which a suspected Islamic extremist from Syria was charged with killing three people.
At the end of August, Germany deported Afghan citizens to their homeland for the first time since the Taliban returned to power in 2021.
