BERLIN: German police arrested a suspect in the stabbing on Friday (Feb 21) evening at Berlin’s Holocaust memorial that severely injured a person two days earlier than a watershed nationwide election.
Berlin’s police division gave no particulars on the id of the suspect or his attainable motive.
“Our forces have detained a suspect within the neighborhood of the crime scene,” metropolis police posted on X. “Investigations proceed.”
Video of the scene confirmed emergency autos and closely armoured police lined alongside one facet of the memorial web site, an unlimited subject of gray concrete pillars the place the assault occurred. The memorial is throughout a road from the US embassy.
The sufferer “was so severely injured that he needed to be taken by the fireplace brigade to hospital for emergency therapy”, police spokesperson Florian Nath mentioned.
The assault occurred round 6pm (1700 GMT). The sufferer’s life was not in peril and he was being ready for surgical procedure, Nath added. Police have been accumulating forensic materials on the web site, he mentioned.
The monument, one of many German capital’s most sacred websites, commemorates the 6 million Jews murdered by Adolf Hitler’s Nazis throughout World Warfare II, one of many darkest episodes in human historical past and a unbroken focus of German historic atonement.
An eyewitness advised native broadcaster RBB24 that the 2 males had appeared to strategy one another earlier than the sufferer was immediately stabbed. Specialist hearth brigade officers have been providing trauma counselling to the witnesses, police mentioned.
The world surrounding the monument, a 1.9ha web site within the coronary heart of the town, was sealed off.
The nationwide election marketing campaign, wherein polls recommend a far-right get together might are available second place for the primary time in 9 a long time, has been marred by a collection of high-profile assaults.
A type of was a stabbing wherein two have been killed, together with a toddler that was blamed on an Afghan immigrant. That prompted a fraught debate on immigration and calls for from the front-runner conservatives for the border to be closed.
In December, a Saudi man who had lived in Germany for years and whose posting historical past confirmed he sympathised with the far-right, rammed a Christmas market with a automobile, killing six, together with a baby, and injuring a whole bunch.
Earlier on Friday, an 18-year-old ethnic Chechen was arrested on suspicion of planning an assault on the Israeli Embassy in Berlin, Bild newspaper reported.
