SOLINGEN (Germany), Aug 25 (NNN-AGENCIES) — German police on Saturday arrested the suspected killer behind a knife rampage that left three people dead at a street festival, an attack claimed by the Daesh group.
The unidentified assailant fled after striking in the western town of Solingen late on Friday, sparking a day-long manhunt.
“We have just arrested the true suspect,” North Rhine-Westphalia region interior minister Herbert Reul said on public television late Saturday evening.
“The man we have been looking for all day has since a short time ago been in detention,” he said, adding that police found evidence to convict him.
In a statement on Telegram, Daesh’s Amaq propaganda arm said that “the perpetrator of the attack on a gathering of Christians in the city of Solingen in Germany yesterday was a soldier of the Islamic State”.
A police spokesman earlier said that officers had arrested a man in a raid at a hostel for asylum seekers, not far from the scene of Friday’s attack.
The people killed were men of 56 and 67 years of age and a 56-year-old woman, officials said.
Four of the wounded were in a “serious” condition, officials said, revising down an earlier estimate of five.
The attacker struck as thousands of people gathered for the first night of a “Festival of Diversity”, part of a series of events to mark Solingen’s 650th anniversary.
There have been several attacks in Germany in recent years, the deadliest being a truck rampage at a Berlin Christmas market in 2016 that killed 12.
A police officer was killed and five people were wounded in a knife attack at a far-right rally in the city of Mannheim in May.
Solingen is a city of some 150,000 people located between Duesseldorf and Cologne.
Germany took in more than a million asylum seekers in 2015-2016 at the height of Europe’s migrant crisis. — NNN-AGENCIES
