German attack: Teenager arrested in connection with murder of three people

A 15-year-old teenager was arrested on Saturday, August 24, in Solingen on suspicion of having prior knowledge of the knife attack that left three dead and eight injured on Friday.four of them seriously, in that city in western Germany.

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“A 15-year-old man was arrested this morning,” police chief Thorsten Fleiss said at a press conference on Saturday.

According to him, the teenager is suspected of having had prior knowledge of the incident and of not having acted to prevent it, but the Investigators believe that this is not the attacker, who is still on the run and is thought to have acted alone.

The suspect, who was arrested this morning at the family home, was identified based on the testimony of two people who heard a suspicious conversation before the incident and who, after the attack, contacted the police.

“We only know that he spoke to one person. Whether that person is the attacker is not certain,” said Markus Caspers, the public prosecutor responsible for the fight against terrorism in the North Rhine-Westphalia region (NRW), at a press conference.

The prosecutor declined to provide a description of the alleged perpetrator of the attack, citing conflicting testimony and the lack of clarity so far in the case.

“Nothing would be more damaging than giving a description, calling on the population to cooperate with the search operation, and discovering in the course of the investigation that the person has a completely different appearance.”he said.

Caspers said that, as the police had been saying throughout the day, the suspicion that the attack, which took place at an open-air party during the celebrations for the 650th anniversary of the founding of Solingen, was an act of terrorism could not be ruled out.

“There is no other apparent motive. The victims were unknown, unrelated. That is why we think it is 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 the images of the attack, the stab wounds were aimed “very precisely” 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 evolution of the injured, of whom four are in critical condition, two serious and two mild.

However, they did not want to confirm the information that appeared in the media about the possible discovery of the murder weapon, a knife, since they pointed out that a lot of material evidence has been collected, whose connection to the crime is still being investigated.

The incident occurred on Friday at around 9.40pm local time (19.40 GMT) in the historic centre of Solingen, near one of the stages where a concert was taking place at the ‘Festival of Diversity’.

After stabbing several people at random, the attacker was able to flee amid the chaos and for the moment, According to police, his whereabouts or identity remain a mystery.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said he was “shocked” by the attack and called for the perpetrator to be punished “to the full extent of the law.”

“In our society we must not tolerate something like this and never accept it,” he said.

German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser is expected to visit the scene this afternoon.

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