Two people were killed in a knife attack in Germany. Scholz says there must be consequences

Two people, including a two-year-old boy, were killed and three were injured in a stabbing attack in Bavaria on Wednesday. The suspect, a former asylum seeker who was about to leave Germany, was arrested.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz he said authorities need to clarify why the suspect is still in the country. He said the attack, a month before national elections where curbing irregular migration is a major issue, must have consequences.

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The attack took place shortly before noon in a park in Aschaffenburg, a city with about 72,000 inhabitants. Bavaria’s top security official, Joachim Herrmann, said the attacker attacked the boy, who was part of a group of kindergarten children, with a kitchen knife.

Said the 2 year old of Moroccan origin was killed, along with a 41-year-old German passer-by who apparently intervened to protect the other children. Bavarian officials said two adults and a two-year-old Syrian girl were injured and taken to hospital for treatment, and that none of them were life-threatening.

Other bystanders chased after the suspect and he was arrested 12 minutes after the attack, Herrmann said.

He said the suspect, a 28-year-old Afghan national, had come to the attention of authorities at least three times for acts of violence. Each time he was sent for psychiatric treatment and later released.

The suspect is believed to have arrived in Germany in November 2022 and applied for asylum in early 2023, Herrmann said. On December 4, he told authorities that he would leave the country voluntarily and would request papers from the Afghan consulate. A week later, the German authorities officially closed the asylum procedure and told him to leave.

In the coming days, the police will work to determine his motive, Herrmann said, adding that the suspicions so far point to his psychiatric illness. An initial search of his room in the refugee home found no evidence that he had radical Islamic views, and only drugs to match his psychiatric treatment were found, he said.

The attack is politically sensitive a month before national elections in Germany.

Scholz issued a strong statement condemning what he called an “incomprehensible act of terrorism”.

“I’m tired of these kinds of acts of violence that happen here every few weeks — from perpetrators who have come here to find protection here,” he said. “False tolerance is inappropriate here. The authorities must come under great pressure to clarify why the attacker was in Germany in the first place.”

This must lead to “immediate consequences – talking is not enough,” Scholz added. He did not elaborate.

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After a knife attack by an Afghan immigrant in Mannheim in May that killed a police officer and injured four others, Scholz promised that Germany would start deporting criminals from Afghanistan and Syria again. He vowed to step up deportations of rejected asylum seekers after a knife attack in Solingen in August in which a suspected Islamic extremist from Syria was accused of killing three people.

At the end of August, Germany deported Afghan citizens to their homeland for the first time since the Taliban returned to power in 2021.