Afghan asylum seeker stabs child to death in Germany
An Afghan national has been detained after viciously attacking a kindergarten group in Bavaria
A two-year-old child and an adult were killed and three others injured when a playschool group was targeted in a knife attack in a town in the German state of Bavaria on Wednesday. The incident was condemned by Chancellor Olaf Scholz as an “unbelievable act of terror.”
The stabbing occurred in a public park in the town of Aschaffenburg, with the suspect, identified as a 28-year-old Afghan national and a failed asylum seeker, targeting a group of toddlers from a daycare center. The attack left a child of “Moroccan origin” and a 41-year-old passerby both dead, Bavaria’s regional interior minister Joachim Herrmann told reporters.
The deceased passerby is believed to have “courageously intervened to protect the other children,” ending up “fatally injured by the attacker,” the minister suggested. Three other victims were hospitalized after the attack, including an adult with multiple knife wounds, a two-year-old Syrian boy with minor wound to his neck, and a daycare teacher who had broken her arm while trying to flee the attacker.
Local police said it had detained the suspect shortly after the incident “in the immediate vicinity of the crime scene.”
The attack has been described by the German chancellor as an “unbelievable act of terror,” with Scholz producing a rare rant targeting asylum seekers. “I am sick of seeing such acts of violence occurring in our country every few weeks, by perpetrators who have actually come here to find protection here,” Scholz said in a statement, adding that “a false notion of tolerance is completely inappropriate here.”
Thus far, the authorities have not named the potential motives behind the attack, with Herrmann suggesting the preliminary information “very strongly in the direction of his obvious mental illness” with no “radical Islamist attitude” uncovered.
The suspect entered the country in 2022, unsuccessfully seeking asylum. The man agreed to voluntarily leave Germany and was meant to do so late last year, Herrmann noted. According to German media reports, the suspect was previously known to the authorities in connection with at least three other violent incidents and received mandatory treatment over his mental problems.
