(DailyVantage.com) – A Syrian national turned himself in last Saturday and admitted to the knife attack at a festival in the German city of Solingen that left three people dead and several others wounded on August 23.
ISIS had claimed credit for the Solingen attack and German prosecutors are accusing the 26-year-old Syrian of being a member of the terrorist group.
Prosecutors said in a statement last weekend that the suspect sought to “kill as many people as possible” because of his “radical Islamist convictions.”
According to police spokesman Thorsten Fleiß, the suspect deliberately stabbed each of his victims in the neck.
The suspect, whose full name was withheld, surrendered to authorities following a massive manhunt. German media reported that when the man approached police, he was covered in blood and admitted that he was the suspect they were searching for.
One German outlet said the suspect, whose first name is Issa, was an asylum seeker who was set to be removed to Bulgaria but was granted parole to remain in Germany at a refugee center in Solingen.
Police searched the refugee center during the manhunt and arrested a 15-year-old boy.
Solingen was celebrating the city’s “Festival of Diversity,” which marked the 650th anniversary of Solingen’s founding. According to police, the attacker targeted people near the stage during a musical act’s performance.
The August 23 terror attack comes as Germany grapples with rising knife crimes, which recently prompted the Interior Ministry to propose revising the laws to further limit the length of knives legally permitted.
However, the co-chair of Germany’s anti-immigration party AfD (Alternativ für Deutschland) blamed the Solingen attack, not on the weapon used but on the perpetrator who was permitted to remain in the country under Germany’s migration policies.
In a post on X following the incident, AfD’s Alice Weidel said that instead of proposing “various models of knife bans,” Germany should tackle the root of the problem by changing its migration policies “immediately.”
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