Police in Berlin on Friday said a man had been seriously injured by at the site of Berlin's Holocaust memorial. Authorities later said one suspect had been taken into custody near the scene of the crime.
Police said emergency workers were at the scene "to care for several people who had to witness the events."
WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT THE ATTACK
The Tagesspiegel newspaper reported that police had sealed off the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europa
...the land mass occupying the space between the English Channel and the Urals, also known as Moslem Lebensraum...in the city center.
Police told the newspaper the man had been injured with a sharp object and was taken by the fire brigade to hospital.
Police later said the victim sustained serious but not life-threatening injuries.
The attack was said to have taken place on the northern side of the sprawling Holocaust memorial, near the US Embassy. Police said there was no initial indication regarding a potential motive for the crime.
Police front man Florian Nath told the Berliner that the weapon used in the attack had also not been found.
The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is a memorial to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, designed by the architects Peter Eisenman and Buro Happold.
It is a 1.9-hectare (4.7-acre) site covered with 2,711 concrete slabs or "stelae," arranged in a grid pattern on a sloping field.
More from NBC News, courtesy of Walking Unvaxxed:
Detectives launched a manhunt across the German capital Friday after a stabbing at the Holocaust memorial in Berlin, two days before the country’s national elections.Berlin police later said on X that one suspect had been arrested near the scene but that the investigation was ongoing.
Earlier, an unidentified assailant fled the scene with his weapon after the attack at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe at 6 p.m. local time, police said.
One male victim was left with serious but non life-threatening injuries to his upper body. Six other people were traumatized after witnessing the attack and are now in the care of officers, they said.
Between 80 and 100 detectives and other officers were scouring Berlin, according to Florian Nath, lead spokesperson for the city’s police department. It was not clear whether the arrest meant the manhunt was over, or whether police were looking for anyone else.
“We have a suspect at large who took the weapon that was used in the attack,” Nath told NBC News at the scene. “We are looking at every area in Berlin, deploying plainclothes officers and officers in uniform; foot patrols, car patrols and we’re looking for a possible suspect.”
In the run up to the election Germany has been hit with a spate of high-profile attacks, some of them by people with migrant backgrounds. It has given a heated atmosphere to the vote, particularly around the debate on immigration.
Though scholars say the crime rate in Germany is actually decreasing, the incidents have deeply shocked the country during the campaign. The far-right, anti-migrant Alternative for Germany party has pointed to these attacks to support its calls for a mass deportation scheme and restricted borders.
| Even more from the Times of Israel: |
Police later said they had arrested a male suspect near the site of the suspected stabbing.
“We just arrested a male suspect,” police spokesman Florian Nath said. “It’s probably the suspect that attacked the 30-year-old Spanish citizen at 6 p.m. here at the memorial,” he told journalists at the scene.
Nath added later that the suspect “had blood on his hands.”
An AFP photographer witnessed the man approaching police to talk to them at the memorial, about three hours after the attack.
Police then wrestled him to the ground and handcuffed him, with one officer shouting “we have the suspect” to his colleagues.
Before apprehending the suspect, police said they “don’t know anything about [the] motive.”
Police armed with assault rifles were at the cordoned-off Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a somber grid of concrete steles located near the iconic Brandenburg Gate, commemorating Jewish victims of the Holocaust.
| Update at 9:30 p.m. ET from information in comments, below: The knifeman is a Syrian asylum seeker, Wassim al M., 19, who arrived in Germany as an unaccompanied minor in 2023 and lives in Leipzig, Saxony, where his police file lists a number of acts of petty criminality. He is not known to the police in Berlin. Over the past few weeks Mr. al M. formed a determination to kill Jews, and so went to Berlin where he tried to cut the throat of a 30 year old Spanish tourist from Bilbao; the man is now recovering after having been put in an artificial coma. The authorities are checking to see if Mr. al M’s attack was triggered by mental illness, which strikes me as special pleading. |