FRANKFURT: A Syrian man who allegedly supports the Daesh group has been charged with attempted murder over the stabbing of a Spanish tourist at Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial, prosecutors said Tuesday.
The suspect, a refugee partially identified as Wassim Al M., is said to have seriously injured the 30-year-old man at the landmark in the German capital in February.
It was one of a series of attacks blamed on foreign nationals that fueled a bitter debate about immigration in the run-up to Germany’s general election.
The suspect “shares the ideology of the foreign terrorist organization Islamic State (IS)” and has “radical Islamist and antisemitic views,” federal prosecutors said in a statement.
He had traveled from the eastern city of Leipzig, where he had been living, to Berlin to target “alleged infidels, whom he regarded as representatives of a Western form of society that he rejected,” prosecutors said.
Shortly before the stabbing, the suspect, who was 19 at the time, sent a photo of himself to IS members so the group could claim responsibility for the attack, they said.
The tourist, from the Basque Country in northern Spain, was wounded in the neck during the attack at Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a somber grid of concrete steles located near the Brandenburg Gate and the US embassy.
The suspect, who was arrested shortly after the attack and is in pre-trial detention, has also been charged with causing serious bodily harm and attempted membership of a foreign terrorist organization.
Officials said previously he had arrived in Germany in 2023.
The attack was one of several which shocked Germany ahead of the general election, which saw a doubling in the vote-share for the far-right, anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD).
The election was won by the center-right CDU/CSU, which has since taken power at the head of a coalition and moved swiftly to introduce stricter curbs on immigration.
The new government under Chancellor Friedrich Merz has signalled it is trying to resume deportations to Syria, which have been suspended since 2012.
Syrian charged over Berlin Holocaust memorial stabbing
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Syrian charged over Berlin Holocaust memorial stabbing
- The suspect, who was arrested shortly after the attack and is in pre trial detention, has also been charged with causing serious bodily harm and attempted membership of a foreign terrorist organization
US military boards another oil tanker in Indian Ocean after tracking it from the Caribbean
- Venezuela has relied on a shadow fleet of falsely flagged tankers to smuggle crude into global supply chains
- The Veronica III left Venezuela on Jan. 3, the same day as Maduro’s capture, with nearly 2 million barrels of crude and fuel oil
WASHINGTON: US military forces boarded another sanctioned tanker in the Indian Ocean after tracking the vessel from the Caribbean Sea in an effort to target illicit oil connected to Venezuela, the Pentagon said Sunday.
Venezuela had faced US sanctions on its oil for several years, relying on a shadow fleet of falsely flagged tankers to smuggle crude into global supply chains. President Donald Trump ordered a quarantine of sanctioned tankers in December to pressure then-President Nicolás Maduro before Maduro was apprehended in January during an American military operation.
Several tankers fled the Venezuelan coast in the wake of the raid, including the ship that was boarded in the Indian Ocean overnight. The Defense Department said in a post on X that US forces boarded the Veronica III, conducting “a right-of-visit, maritime interdiction and boarding.”
“The vessel tried to defy President Trump’s quarantine — hoping to slip away,” the Pentagon said. “We tracked it from the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean, closed the distance, and shut it down.”
Video posted by the Pentagon shows US troops boarding the tanker.
The Veronica III is a Panamanian-flagged vessel under US sanctions related to Iran, according to the website of the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control.
The Veronica III left Venezuela on Jan. 3, the same day as Maduro’s capture, with nearly 2 million barrels of crude and fuel oil, TankerTrackers.com posted Sunday on X.
“Since 2023, she’s been involved with Russian, Iranian and Venezuelan oil,” the organization said.
Samir Madani, co-founder of TankerTrackers.com, told The Associated Press in January that his organization used satellite imagery and surface-level photos to document that at least 16 tankers left the Venezuelan coast in contravention of the quarantine.
The Trump administration has been seizing tankers as part of its broader efforts to take control of the Venezuela’s oil. The Pentagon did not say in the post whether the Veronica III was formally seized and placed under US control, and later told the AP in an email that it had no additional information to provide beyond that post.
Last week, the US military boarded a different tanker in the Indian Ocean, the Aquila II. The ship was being held while its ultimate fate was decided by the United States, according to a defense official who spoke last week on condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing decision-making.
