BERLIN: A Syrian man arrested after a stabbing attack at Berlin’s Holocaust memorial that seriously wounded a Spanish man had been harboring a “plan to kill Jews,” police and prosecutors said Saturday.
The 19-year-old arrested Friday with blood stains on his hands was carrying a copy of the Qur'an and a prayer rug, and initial investigations suggested “connections with the Middle East conflict,” they said.
The assault shocked Germany two days before Sunday’s general elections after a campaign centered heavily on immigration and security fueled by a series of deadly stabbing and car ramming attacks blamed on migrants.
Interior Minister Nancy Faeser condemned the “abhorrent and brutal crime” and said that “we must assume an anti-Semitic” motivation.
The Syrian suspect “must be punished with the full force of the law and deported directly from prison,” she said in a statement. “We will use all means to deport violent offenders back to Syria.”
The attacker approached the 30-year-old Spanish man from behind at around 6:00 p.m. (1700 GMT) and stabbed him in the neck with a knife, according to investigators.
The assault took place at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a somber grid of concrete steles located near the Brandenburg Gate and the US embassy in Berlin.
The victim suffered life-threatening injuries and had to be placed in an artificial coma but was no longer in critical condition.
The Syrian suspect came to Germany in 2023 as an unaccompanied minor, police said. He was granted asylum and lived in the eastern city of Leipzig.
There was no evidence of links to other people or groups and the suspect had not previously come to the attention of the police in Berlin, they said.
Six people who witnessed the knife attack received counselling from rescue services at the scene, where bloodied clothes were left on the ground.
The run-up to Germany’s election on Sunday has been heavily dominated by a bitter debate on migration and a surge in support for the far-right AfD, now polling at around 20 percent.
Just ten days before the vote, an Afghan man was arrested on suspicion of plowing a car through a street rally in Munich, killing a two-year-old girl and her mother and injuring dozens.
In January, a man with a kitchen knife attacked a kindergarten group, killing a two-year-old boy and a man who tried to protect the toddlers.
Police arrested a 28-year-old Afghan man at the scene of the attack in the southern city of Aschaffenburg.
In December, a Saudi man was held on suspicion of driving an SUV at high speed through a Christmas market crowd, killing six people and wounding hundreds in the eastern city of Magdeburg.
The attacks have prompted conservative leader Friedrich Merz, the frontrunner in the election race, to pledge a “fundamental” overhaul of Germany’s asylum rules.
Germany has grown increasingly alarmed about rising anti-Jewish sentiment and violence since the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel that sparked the war in Gaza.
A record 5,164 anti-Semitic crimes were recorded in 2023, compared with 2,641 the previous year, according to figures from the domestic intelligence agency.
In an attack in early September, German police shot dead a young Austrian man known to have had ties to radical Islam as he was preparing to carry out an attack on the Israeli consulate in Munich.