2024 Solingen stabbing

2024 Solingen stabbing
2024 Solingen stabbing (North Rhine-Westphalia) 2024 Solingen stabbing (Germany) 2024 Solingen stabbing (Europe)
Location	Fronhof marketplace, Solingen, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany
Date	23 August 2024 (2024-08-23) c. 21:40 (UTC+2)
Target	Solingen 650th anniversary festival, named the Festival of Diversity
Attack type	Mass stabbing
Weapon	Knife
Deaths	3
Injured	8
Motive	Islamic extremism

On the evening of 23 August 2024, a mass stabbing took place during a festival celebrating the 650th anniversary of Solingen, Germany, when a Syrian man armed with a knife killed three people and injured eight others. The public prosecutor accused the suspect of being motivated by "radical Islamist convictions". The attacker is also suspected of being a member of Islamic State, which claimed responsibility for the attack.

Following the attack, a 24-hour manhunt ensued, which ended with police arresting the suspect, whose behaviour and appearance had struck them as suspicious. During the search, residents were advised to stay vigilant.

The suspect, a 26-year-old Sunni Muslim from Deir ez-Zor, Syria, arrived in Germany in 2022. His asylum application was rejected, and although he was ordered to be deported to Bulgaria—where he had previously applied for asylum—authorities were unable to locate him, during which time he remained in Germany.

The stabbing has intensified the migration debate in Germany, prompting some politicians to advocate for stricter border controls and a suspension of refugee admissions. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz characterised the attack as "terrorism against us all" and stressed the need for his government to expedite repatriation and deportation.

Background

Solingen, a city with a population of approximately 160,000, is situated near the larger cities of Cologne and Düsseldorf in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany's most populous state.

The attack occurred during an event called the Festival of Diversity (Festival der Vielfalt), a three-day event from 23 to 25 August celebrating Solingen's 650th anniversary. It had been billed as turning the city center into a big "celebration mile" stretching from Neumarkt to Fronhof to Mühlenplatz. The incident took place at the Fronhof, a central square and marketplace in the heart of the city, where a stage had been set up for live music performances.

Prior to the stabbing, there was a 10% annual rise in knife attacks in Germany, particularly in city centers and at railway stations. Interior minister Nancy Faeser earlier in August 2024 told public broadcaster ARD that more stringent restrictions were needed on knives in public places, with exceptions only for household knives in closed packaging that have just been bought.

Attack

The attack occurred around 21:40 local time (19:40 UTC). A man stabbed several people, killing three and wounding eight others, in front of a music stage. All four of the severely wounded were said on 25 August to be on their way to recovery. DJ Topic, performing at the time of the attack, said he had been asked by security to continue his set to prevent mass panic.

Initially, authorities said they were considering the possibility of terrorism as a motive for the attack, which police believe was the work of a single attacker. On 24 August, Islamic State (ISIS) released a statement through its Amaq News Agency outlet on the messaging app Telegram claiming responsibility and on 25 August through social media channels, a one-minute video of a man, who the group claimed to be the perpetrator, holding a knife and swearing an oath of loyalty to its leader. This was the first time that ISIS had claimed responsibility for a terrorist attack on German soil since the 2016 Berlin truck attack.

The three dead victims were two men, aged 56 and 67, and a 56-year-old woman, all from the Solingen area. No other details on the victims have been released. Police issued a major alert and launched a manhunt. Armed officers were on site, having cordoned off large sections of the city, with barriers in place across various locations.

According to the German daily Bild, heavily armed SEK units, totaling around 40 special vehicles from across North Rhine-Westphalia, were deployed to Solingen. Road junctions were blocked, and residents were advised to stay indoors and avoid the city center.

Following the attack, the remainder of the festival was canceled. A 15-year-old was arrested in connection with the case, with authorities stating he was seen speaking with the perpetrator moments before the attack. The teenager is not the primary suspect but is alleged to have known about the attack without reporting it to authorities.

Suspect

Nearly 26 hours after the stabbing, the police arrested a 26-year-old Syrian as a suspect, his clothes dirty and bloody. Police had addressed him right after noticing his behaviour and appearance as suspicious. His whereabouts in the time between the stabbing and the arrest, and whether he had spoken to anybody and what he had done in that time remained unclear as of early September 2024.

The suspect, whom the police were already searching for in connection with the attack, is a Sunni Muslim who was born in Deir ez-Zor, Syria, and had come to Germany in December 2022. He had not been identified by authorities as an Islamic extremist prior to the attack. A year after filing an asylum application in Bielefeld, he moved to Paderborn. He had originally entered the European Union through Bulgaria, and German authorities, based on the Dublin Regulation, tried to deport him back to Bulgaria in early 2023 but he could not be found at his assigned refugee housing in Paderborn when police arrived there in the early hours of 5 June 2023 to pick him up, according to a report by the state refugee ministry for the state parliament from early September 2024. The report said that the suspect had been seen at lunch in the housing on 5 June; it also uncovered a previous longer absence from 18 to 24 April 2023. As the municipal immigration office in Bielefeld had not known about the latter absence, it did not consider requiring the suspect to stay in his room at night; had such a requirement been made, it would have allowed authorities to extend the deadline for his return to Bulgaria in case of a breach. Because he was not known to be dangerous, authorities did not issue a warrant for his arrest after the abortive attempt at deportation. After six months, in which no second attempt at deportation was made, the deadline for the return had run out, so Germany was now responsible for processing his asylum claim. He showed back up a few days later and was granted subsidiary protection in late 2023 and was assigned accommodation in Solingen.

After the arrest of the alleged perpetrator, the Public Prosecutor General took over the investigation on suspicion of a terrorist offence or politically motivated crime. On 25 August, the alleged perpetrator was remanded in pre-trial custody on suspicion of murder and membership of ISIS, among other charges. He was named only as Issa al H. due to German privacy laws. On the same day, prosecutors stated that he "shared the radical ideology of the Islamic State extremist group" and the motive for the attack was his "radical Islamist convictions". A team of 50 investigators supported by the Federal Criminal Police Office was working on the case as of early September 2024.

Reactions

View from Solingen's Küstergasse to the beginning of Fronhof, where the Chancellor, Minister-President and others laid flowers on 26 August

A memorial for the victims

Minister of the Interior of North Rhine-Westphalia Herbert Reul, who traveled to Solingen on the night of the attack, warned against speculation about the perpetrator, saying that it was as yet impossible to say anything about him or his motives. Reul, Federal Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser and North Rhine-Westphalia minister president Hendrik Wüst visited the crime scene on 24 August.

Solingen's mayor, Tim Kurzbach, wrote a post about the attack on the city's Facebook page, saying that "This evening, we are all in shock, horror and great sadness in Solingen. We all wanted to celebrate our city's anniversary together and now we have to mourn the dead and injured." He also thanked all emergency services that responded to the attack.

After the attack, the political debate about concrete consequences first centred around making the German weapons law more stringent. Vice-chancellor Robert Habeck of the Greens expressed support for such a measure, while saying it was uncertain if this could have prevented the attack. The debate shifted after it transpired that the suspect is a rejected asylum seeker. In an email to chancellor Olaf Scholz of the SPD seen by media, Friedrich Merz, leader of the CDU/CSU, the largest opposition party, asked for radical changes in migration policy. SPD chief Lars Klingbeil asked for a slate of measures against Islamic extremism. Fellow SPD chief Saskia Esken said in early September that lessons should be drawn from the attack, after previous statements by her to the extent that there was nothing much to learn from it, as the alleged perpetrator had not been known to police, had widely been criticized. Esken expressed preference for better enforcement of existing asylum legislation over tightening it. She also called for requiring social media companies to control content. The far-right party Alternative for Germany blamed not only the ruling coalition but also the CDU/CSU opposition for alleged shortcomings on security, linking it with immigration even before the identity of the assailant was released.

On 26 August, chancellor Olaf Scholz described the attack as "terrorism, terrorism against us all" during a visit to Solingen. He emphasised the need for his government to ensure that individuals who should not be in Germany are repatriated and deported, with a focus on accelerating the process if needed. He also committed to promptly strengthening regulations on weapon ownership.

On 29 August, the German government proposed a toughening of weapons laws and asylum rules. Two draft laws were introduced by the government on 12 September, which covered extending knife prohibitions, reducing state support to certain refugees, and extending powers of authorities in fighting terrorism.

On 30 August, Germany deported 28 Afghan nationals to Afghanistan after 2 months of negotiations with Qatar as a mediator. All individuals were males and convicted criminals, and each received €1,000.

Influenced by the stabbing, the state of Thuringia in late August granted its district governments the right to declare no-weapons zones in certain public places, and Bavaria declared in early September its intention to do the same. Similar measures had already been taken in other German states years before the stabbing.

Criminologist Dirk Baier of the Zurich University of Applied Sciences warned that stricter laws were unlikely to root out knife assaults, saying that they were ineffective against young perpetrators and that there had to be enough checking personnel in the proposed weapons-ban zones. He called the stabbings a "social problem" that had to be addressed with social measures. When interviewed by the press service of the Evangelical Church in Germany, social psychologist Andreas Zick of the University of Bielefeld called for a thorough analysis of the terror, a deepened analysis of potential perpetrators, a careful assessment of options for the possibility of implementation from a legal viewpoint – something that he saw as having been neglected by parties in the middle of the political spectrum in the past –, and most of all, care for the victims and their relatives. The Israel–Hamas war had, according to Zick, already increased the risk of violence in Germany and other European countries. He said that the Solingen attack would yield information on where the violence came from and which old and new ideologies played a role in this.

The government measures to reduce support for rejected asylum seekers as announced on 29 August, were watered down by SPD and Green party members of the German Bundestag who apparently wanted to prevent rejected asylum seekers from becoming homeless and impoverished. After the new regulation from mid October, support can now only be stopped if there are no obstacles blocking rejected asylum seekers from leaving. After a meeting in the "Innenausschuss", an Interior ministry committee, where the changes were discussed, opposition members called the measures pointless. While a police union representative called them a mockery of the victims of Solingen.

See also

• 2024 Munich shooting
• 2024 Mannheim stabbing
• 2023 Brokstedt stabbing
• List of mass stabbing incidents (2020–present)
• List of mass stabbings in Germany
• Stabbing as a terrorist tactic