O A 26-year-old man “handed himself over to the investigating authorities and said he was responsible for the attack,” Düsseldorf police said.
The knife attack, which left three dead and eight injured, took place on Friday at 9:45 pm local time (8:45 pm in Lisbon), in the historic center of Solingen, near one of the stages where a Diversity Festival concert was taking place.
After stabbing several people at random, the attacker managed to escape amidst the chaos that ensued.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said he was shocked by the attack and called for the perpetrator to be punished “to the fullest extent” of the law.
“In our society we should not tolerate something like this and never accept it,” he declared.
However, the fundamentalist group Islamic State (IS) claimed responsibility for the attack.
An anonymous security source told Amaq, the IS propaganda agency, that “the perpetrator of yesterday’s attack [sexta-feira] against a gathering of Christians in the city of Solingen, Germany, is an Islamic State fighter.”
According to the statement released on the digital platform Telegram, the informant said that the perpetrator carried out the attack “as revenge for Muslims in Palestine and elsewhere”, without providing further details.
The prosecutor responsible for combating terrorism in the North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) region, Markus Caspers, said at a press conference on Saturday that, as police had indicated throughout the day, it could not be ruled out that the attack, which took place at an open-air party during the celebrations of the 650th anniversary of the founding of Solingen, was an act of terrorism.
“There is no other apparent motive. The victims were unknown, unrelated. That’s why we think it’s possible that it was an act of terrorism,” he said.
The director of the police operation supported this hypothesis by confirming, in response to questions from the press, that, according to images of the attack, the stab wounds were aimed “with great precision” at the victims’ necks.
Police officials also made public the ages of the fatal victims, two men aged 56 and 67 and a woman aged 56, and the condition of the injured, four of whom are in critical condition, two in serious condition and two with minor injuries.
The police also reported the arrest in Solingen of a suspect involved in the case: a 15-year-old teenager who allegedly had prior knowledge of the attack that shocked Germany and did nothing to prevent it.
The young man, who was arrested at the family home, was identified based on the testimony of two people who heard a suspicious conversation before the events during the festival and who, after the attack, contacted the police.
Later that night, German police announced a second arrest in connection with the attack.
“We followed a tip-off and that’s why there was a special forces operation,” a police spokesman said at the time, after the press reported that searches were underway at a refugee reception center in the center of Solingen.
Read Also: Borrell condemns attacks and calls for combating “all forms of hatred”
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Source: https://www.noticiasaominuto.com/mundo/2620681/suspeito-de-ataque-que-matou-tres-pessoas-na-alemanha-confessou-o-crime
