Hamburg knife attack stokes refugee debate
HAMBURG, Germany: A volatile asylum debate looks set to reopen in Germany weeks ahead of parliamentary elections, after a failed asylum seeker killed one person and wounded five with a knife in the northern city of Hamburg on Saturday.
Police are expected to offer further details about the incident at a midday press conference.
The 26-year-old fled the scene of the crime in a neighborhood supermarket before being overpowered by passers-by, witnesses recounted.
The attack had been motivated by “hate,” Mayor Olaf Scholz said, although he stopped short of declaring it a terrorist incident.
“These criminals want to poison our free society with fear, but they will not succeed,” he added. Police were unable to immediately confirm the suspect’s nationality or identify the motive behind the violence.
The attacker had been scheduled to be deported, but the process had been held up as he lacked identity papers, Scholz said.
“It makes me especially angry that the perpetrator appears to be a person who claimed protection in Germany and then turned his hate against us,” he added.
Images of heavily-armed police searching the Hamburg accommodation center where the man lived were posted by newspaper Bild on its website late Friday.
A police murder unit and a squad specializing in politically-motivated crime are investigating the attack. Germany has been on high alert.
The attacker stabbed to death a 50-year-old man, believed to be a German citizen, and “struck out wildly” at others, wounding a woman and four men aged 19 to 64, police said.
Another 35-year-old man was hurt while overpowering the attacker in the street alongside other passers-by shortly after the killing.
“A crowd of about 30 people ran out of the supermarket. They yelled that someone had been stabbed... we saw a man go past with a big knife, like a butcher’s knife, in his hand,” witness Ralf Woyna told AFP.
Woyna had been sitting at a cafe opposite the entrance to the shop where the chase began.
An amateur mobile phone video published by news site Spiegel Online showed a handful of pursuers confronting the attacker, a bearded man wearing a T-shirt and jeans, amid dense city traffic.