Child, 6, among injured as knife attacker sets fire to Swiss train

A MAN armed with a knife has set a train carriage on fire in Switzerland, leaving six people, including a six-yearold child, in hospital with stab wounds and burns.

A 27-year-old Swiss citizen allegedly carried out the attack on a train travelling near the border with Liechtenstein, and was also injured, regional police in Saint Gallen said.

The motive for the attack was not immediately known, but it is the latest in a series of similar assaults in Europe over the past month, including one by a 17-year-old Afghan asylum seeker who injured five people with an axe and a knife on a train in Germany.

Swiss police said the attacker used a flammable liquid to set the carriage on fire and then stabbed passengers with “at least one knife”.

The incident took place around 1pm UK time, they said, between the towns of Buchs and Sennwald, as the train was approaching Salez station. The carriage was left covered with blood, local media reported.

The injured, including the suspected attacker, were admitted to various hospitals with burn and stab wounds, some of them severe. The victims included two men, aged 17 and 50, and three women, aged 17, 34 and 43, who were among dozens of people on the train at the time.

Three rescue helicopters were rushed to the scene along with police, firemen, and ambulances.

Police said the train had suffered damage upwards of 100,000 Swiss francs (£80,000).

The train assault was the first attack of its kind in Switzerland in recent memory.

There have been a string of assaults on the public in neighbouring France and Germany, as well as Belgium, over the past 18 months, most of which were claimed by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) terrorist group.

Isil claimed responsibility for last month’s knife and axe train attack in Germany, and later released video of the teenage assailant being shot dead by police as he fled the scene.

Last month in Germany, a Syrian man wounded 15 people when he blew himself up near a music festival.

However, police were not ruling out the possibility the incident was of a crime of passion, welt.de reported.

The police spokesman told the German news website that authorities did not yet know the motive behind the attack, but thought terrorism unlikely.

“A terrorism background [as a motive for the attack] still seems very, very far-fetched,” the spokesman said.

‘A terrorism background [as a motive for the Salez attack] still seems very, very far-fetched’