Last Friday, the Times of Israel reported that a stabbing attack took place at the Berlin Holocaust Memorial. One day later, the Berlin Police told DW that the suspect was a Syrian citizen with anti-Semitic motives.
By Rachel Avraham
Last Friday, the Times of Israel reported that a stabbing attack took place at the Berlin Holocaust Memorial. “We just arrested a male suspect,” police spokesman Florian Nath said. “It’s probably the suspect that attacked the 30-year-old Spanish citizen at 6 p.m. here at the memorial,” he told journalists at the scene. Nath added later that the suspect “had blood on his hands.”
One day later, the Berlin Police told DW that the suspect was a Syrian citizen with anti-Semitic motives. According to the report, he is now under investigation for attempted murder. “According to what we know so far, especially based on statements made by the accused to the police, he has been planning to kill Jews for several weeks,” police said. By sheer mistake, a 30-year-old Spanish tourist was targeted instead of a Jew, resulting in the tourist getting critically injured.
According to US News and World report, the Police and prosecutors said in a statement that the victim sustained life-threatening injuries to the neck when he was attacked with a knife. According to the report, the 30-year-old underwent an emergency operation and was put into an artificial coma for a while, and his life is no longer in danger, they added.
DW reported that the Police said the suspect came to Germany in 2023 as an unaccompanied minor. According to the report, he was granted asylum and lived in the city of Leipzig in the eastern state of Saxony, investigators said. Investigators said the suspect was not previously known to law enforcement. But according to US News and World Report, at the time of his arrest, he was carrying a backpack containing a prayer mat, a Quran, a sheet with verses from the Quran as well as Friday’s date, and the knife apparently used in the attack.
US News and World Report claims that the investigation so far points to a link between the attack and the conflict in the Middle East. That was apparently why he chose to mount the attack at the memorial dedicated to the 6 million Jews massacred in the Holocaust, the worst genocide in human history. However, as of today, it appears to be a lone-wolf attack, with the terrorist not having any links to groups based in the Middle East.
German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser described the attack as an “abhorrent and brutal crime” for which the suspect “must be punished with the full force of the law.” She told the BBC: “We will use all means to deport violent offenders back to Syria.”
The Times of Israel reported that Germany has grown increasingly alarmed about rising anti-Jewish sentiment since the October 7, 2023, Hamas massacre on Israel that sparked the war in Gaza. According to the report, a record 5,164 antisemitic crimes were recorded in 2023 in Germany, compared with 2,641 in 2022, according to figures from the federal domestic intelligence agency. In an attack in early September, German police shot dead a young Austrian known for his ties to radical Islam as he was preparing to attack the Israeli consulate in Munich. Other attacks have recently shocked Germany.
According to the BBC, several stabbing and car-ramming attacks have taken place in Germany in recent months, in the cities of Mannheim, Solingen, Magdeburg, Aschaffenburg and Munich. In particular, the terror attack last December was particularly shocking, when a man drove an SUV at high speed through a Christmas market crowd, killing six people and wounding hundreds in the eastern city of Magdeburg. According to the report, all of the alleged attackers were migrants. This wanton violence has caused immigration to be a major electoral issue in Germany, with many on the right highly critical of Germany’s open-door policy for Muslim immigrants.
