Man accused in fatal knife attack recently radicalized

BERLIN — German police said Saturday that the 26-year-old man accused of killing one person and wounding five others with a knife in Hamburg was known to them as a recently radicalized Islamic extremist, but that they did not believe he posed an imminent danger.

Hamburg authorities in were still piecing together what motivated the man, a Palestinian born in the United Arab Emirates, to attack shoppers and passers-by in and around a supermarket Friday. They described him as suffering from psychological problems. Authorities did not release his name, in keeping with German privacy laws.

“It remains unclear which was the overriding element,” said Andy Grote, Hamburg’s interior minister. The man’s application for asylum had been rejected, and he was in the process of being deported, officials said.

Authorities said that they had so far found no indication that the man had any links to local or international terrorist groups, but that they were still looking into his background.

Police are holding the man on suspicion of murder and attempted murder, but charges will not be filed until the completion of a psychological assessment, said Jörg Fröhlich, the Hamburg state prosecutor.

Authorities were alerted to the possible radicalization of the man after one of his friends contacted security officials, said Torsten Voss, director of Hamburg’s state intelligence agency.

“A friend of his told us that this guy used to frequently drink alcohol, but recently he had noticed a change,” Voss said, describing the friend’s conversation with officials in August 2016. “They said he started talking a lot about the Quran, stopped drinking alcohol and questioning many things.”

But last year an evaluator who interviewed the Palestinian said that while he had mental health problems, he did not pose an imminent danger, Voss said.

Germany’s interior minister, Thomas de Maizière, cautioned against jumping to conclusions before police finished their investigation.

“Painful experience also teaches us that we must expect that jihadist ideology will be used as the reason or justification for acts that are perhaps carried out for very different reasons,” de Maizière said.