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.
Syrian suspect in Berlin stabbing wanted ‘to kill Jews’: police
https://arab.news/6bjf7
Syrian suspect in Berlin stabbing wanted ‘to kill Jews’: police
- The assault shocked Germany two days before Sunday’s general elections after a campaign centered heavily on immigration
- Interior Minister Nancy Faeser condemned the “abhorrent and brutal crime” and said that “we must assume an anti-Semitic” motivation
Afghanistan says it thwarted Pakistani airstrike on Bagram Air Base as fighting enters fourth day
- The fighting has been the most severe between the neighbors for years
- Pakistan accuses Taliban government of harboring militant groups that stage attacks against it
KABUL: Afghanistan thwarted attempted airstrikes on Bagram Air Base, the former US military base north of Kabul, authorities said Sunday, while cross-border fighting between Pakistan and Afghanistan stretched into a fourth day.
The fighting has been the most severe between the neighbors for years, with Pakistan declaring that it’s in “open war” with Afghanistan.
The conflict has alarmed the international community, particularly as the area is one where other militant organizations, including Al-Qaeda and the Daesh group, still have a presence and have been trying to resurface.
Pakistan accuses Afghanistan’s Taliban government of harboring militant groups that stage attacks against it and also of allying with its archrival India.
Border clashes in October killed dozens of soldiers, civilians and suspected militants until a Qatari-mediated ceasefire ended the intense fighting. But several rounds of peace talks in Turkiye in November failed to produce a lasting agreement, and the two sides have occasionally traded fire since then.
On Sunday, the police headquarters of Parwan province, where Bagram is located, said in a statement that several Pakistani military jets had entered Afghan airspace “and attempted to bomb Bagram Air Base” at around 5 a.m.
The statement said Afghan forces responded with “anti-aircraft and missile defense systems” and had managed to thwart the attack.
There was no immediate response from Pakistan’s military or government regarding Kabul’s claim of attempted airstrikes on Bagram or the ongoing fighting.
Bagram was the United States’ largest military base in Afghanistan. It was taken over by the Taliban as they swept across the country and took control in the wake of the chaotic US withdrawal from the country in 2021. Last year, US President Donald Trump suggested he wanted to reestablish a US presence at the base.
The current fighting began when Afghanistan launched a broad cross-border attack on Thursday night, saying it was in retaliation for Pakistani airstrikes the previous Sunday.
Pakistan had said its airstrike had targeted the outlawed Pakistani Taliban, also known as Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP. Afghanistan had said only civilians were killed.
The TTP militant group, which is separate but closely allied with Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban, operates inside Pakistan, where it has been blamed for hundreds of deaths in bombings and other attacks over the years.
Pakistan accuses Afghanistan’s Taliban government of providing a safe haven within Afghanistan for the TTP, an accusation that Afghanistan denies.
After Thursday’s Afghan attack, Pakistani Defense Minister Khawaja Mohammad Asif declared that “our patience has now run out. Now it is open war between us.”
In the ongoing fighting, each side claims to have killed hundreds of the other side’s forces — and both governments put their own casualties at drastically lower numbers.
Two Pakistani security officials said that Pakistani ground forces were still in control on Sunday of a key Afghan post and a 32-square-kilometer area in the southern Zhob sector near Kandahar province, after having seized it during fighting Friday. The captured post and surrounding area remain under Pakistani control, they added. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity, because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly.
In Kabul, the Afghan government rejected Pakistan’s claims. Deputy government spokesman Hamdullah Fitrat called the reports “baseless.”
Afghan officials said that fighting had continued overnight and into Sunday in the border areas.
The police command spokesman for Nangarhar province, Said Tayyeb Hammad, said that anti-aircraft missiles were used from the provincial capital, Jalalabad, and surrounding areas on Pakistani fighter jets flying overhead Sunday morning.
Defense Ministry spokesman Enayatulah Khowarazmi said that Afghan forces had launched counterattacks with snipers across the border from Nangarhar, Paktia, Khost and Kandahar provinces overnight. He said that two Pakistani drones had been shot down and dozens of Pakistani soldiers had been killed.
Fitrat said that Pakistani drone attacks hit civilian homes in Nangarhar province late Saturday, killing a woman and a child, while mortar fire killed another civilian when it hit a home in Paktia province.
There was no immediate response to the claims from Pakistani officials.
