A knife attacker in Germany killed a two-year-old child and a man and seriously wounded two other people on Wednesday, January 22, said police, who arrested an Afghan suspect at the scene. It is the latest in a series of deadly knife attacks to have shaken Germany in recent months, fuelling concerns over public safety.
The stabbings happened in a public park in the center of the Bavarian city of Aschaffenburg at around 11:45 am, police said. The attacker targeted a group of children from a daycare center who were in the park, according to German media. "Two people were fatally injured," police said, while another two were seriously hurt and receiving treatment in hospital.
The suspect, a 28-year-old man from Afghanistan, was arrested "in the immediate vicinity of the crime scene," police added, without indicating a motive. German media reported that the man was said to have had psychological issues for which he had received treatment. The suspect lived in an asylum center in the area, news outlet Der Spiegel reported.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz demanded to know why the suspect had been able to stay in the country. "The authorities must explain as quickly as possible why the attacker was even still in Germany," Scholz said in a statement.
Bavaria state Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann said the suspect had come to the attention of authorities for violent behavior on three separate occasions. The unnamed suspect had entered Germany in 2022 and unsuccessfully sought asylum and was meant to have left late last year, Herrmann told a press conference.
Scholz called the attack "an unbelievable act of terror" and offered his sympathies to the victims' families and two more people injured. "But that is not enough: I am sick of seeing such acts of violence occurring in our country every few weeks by perpetrators who have actually come here to find protection here," he added. He said that "a false notion of tolerance is completely inappropriate here."
Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said she was "deeply shocked" by the attack. "The investigation will clarify the background to this terrible act of violence," she said in a statement. Following the attack, police said there were "no indications of other suspects" and no further danger to the public. A second person held by police was being treated as a witness.
Authorities had cordoned off the park in Aschaffenburg, around 36 kilometers southeast of Frankfurt in the west of Germany. Police said train traffic around the scene had been suspended, with services delayed or diverted. The Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper reported that the suspect had tried to flee across the train tracks.
Germany has been rocked by a spate of high-profile attacks, including the death of a policeman in June after he intervened in a knife attack at an anti-Islam rally in the city of Mannheim. A man from Afghanistan was arrested on suspicion of carrying out the stabbing. In August, three people were killed and eight wounded in a stabbing spree at a street festival in the western city of Solingen. The Islamic State group claimed the attack and police arrested a Syrian suspect.
The presumed Islamist motive behind the stabbing in Solingen and the suspect's status as a migrant who was facing deportation fuelled a bitter debate over immigration. The government responded to the incident by tightening controls on knives, limiting benefits for asylum seekers and handing the security services new powers of investigation.
Wednesday's attack in Aschaffenburg comes as Germany prepares for national elections on February 23. The conservative CDU/CSU alliance currently leads in the polls on around 30%, with the far-right, anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) in second with 20%. Both parties have promised to crack down on illegal immigration. The conservatives have also pledged a "de facto" ban on new asylum requests at the border.
In response to the latest attack, the co-leader of the AfD, Alice Weidel, posted a message on X urging "remigration now!" – using a term that the far right has adopted to call for the mass deportation of migrants. Scholz's center-left Social Democrats sit third in the polls with around 16% of support.