Shopper stabbed to death by ‘Islamist’ attacker

Six people injured in Hamburg by knifeman who the city’s mayor said was a ‘failed asylum seeker’

A MAN shouting “Allahu Akbar” (God is greatest) stabbed to death one person and wounded six others in a supermarket in Hamburg yesterday.

The attacker, who was born in the United Arab Emirates, was overpowered by passers-by in the German city and arrested.

Olaf Scholz, the mayor of Hamburg, said the attack had been motivated by “hate” and added that the suspect was a failed asylum seeker whose deportation had been blocked because he lacked identity papers.

Citing security sources, Berlin newspaper Der Tagesspiegel reported that the 26-year-old perpetrator was known to police as an Islamist. News agency DPA reported that security authorities were investigating evidence the man had Salafist ties. The attacker stabbed to death a 50-year-old man believed to be a German citizen.

Police said that he “struck out wildly” at others, wounding five more in the supermarket – a 50-year-old woman and four men aged 19, 56, 57 and 64. Another 35-year-old man was hurt while overpowering the attacker in the street alongside other passersby, shortly after the killing.

All of the wounded were being treated or operated on in hospital, some of them for serious injuries, police said. A police murder unit and a specialist politically-motivated crime squad are investigating the attack and were able to secure the suspected murder weapon.

German daily Bild published a picture of the attacker in the back of a police car with a white, blood-soaked bag over his head, and reported that he cried “Allahu Akbar” during the attack.

“Suddenly I saw a man smeared with blood running along the other side of the road with a knife,” an eyewitness identified as Ralf W told Bild. “He shouted out ‘Allahu Akbar’ as he was running.”

A female witness standing in line at the supermarket till also told the NTV rolling news channel that “as he was running out... he held up his arms and shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’.”

“I thought I was in a horror movie, I thought he would kill me,” an unnamed woman who had been in the store told NTV.

She said she feared she would die, as she was “queuing for the till and couldn’t get away”. The suspect fled the supermarket after the attack. But “people were running after him with improvised weapons, chairs and sticks... they ran after him into a side street,” Ralf W told Bild.

“People chased after the killer with chairs, they were throwing them at him,” Shaylin Roettmer, a bakery worker, told DPA.

The witnesses slightly injured the attacker while they were overpowering him, before handing him over to the police.