Man arrested in attack on EMTs charged in ’06 killing

A man suspected in the stabbing of two emergency medical technicians has been charged in two cold cases, including the 2006 sexual assault and killing of a teenager, police said Wednesday.

Police say it’s an incredible coincidence: Just hours before the EMTs were attacked with a box cutter on a Detroit street early Tuesday, investigators had begun searching for Michael Montgomery. Prosecutors had approved a first-degree murder charge Monday in the nearly decade-old death of a 16-year-old girl.

Sgt. Lance Sullivan of the coldcase unit said the key evidence was DNA taken from Montgomery during an arrest earlier this year. The results became available last week.

Montgomery, 30, appeared in court Wednesday via jail video on the murder charge and was denied bond. He hasn’t been charged yet in the stabbings of EMTs Kelly Adams and Alfredo Rojas.

Adams and Rojas responded to a 911 call and were attacked while tending to Montgomery’s girlfriend, who had an injured ankle. Police said the EMTs had refused to allow him to get in the ambulance around 12:30 a.m. Tuesday.

In a further sign that a diplomatic push might be underway to end the four-year crisis, Russia announced Wednesday that Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry had agreed to meet Friday in Vienna with their counterparts from Saudi Arabia and Turkey — both firm Assad critics.

President Assad’s visit to Moscow, his first known trip abroad since war broke out in 2011, was announced on Wednesday, the morning after it happened, and raised intense speculation about the two leaders’ motives — and a strong response from Washington.

“We view the red-carpet welcome for Assad, who has used chemical weapons against his own people, at odds with the stated goal by the Russians for a political transition in Syria,” said White House spokesman Eric Schultz.

If nothing else, it underscored how emboldened the embattled Syrian leader has become in the wake of the Russian airstrikes that began on Sept. 30 and Iran’s deployment of ground forces to fight alongside Syrian troops.

Russia says it is targeting militants, especially those of the extremist Islamic State group. But critics say Moscow’s military intervention props up Assad and is likely to fan the violence.

The oblique references Wednesday by both leaders to their meeting did little