A 21-year-old Syrian man has been charged with murder for stabbing two tourists, one fatally, in Dresden’s eastern city in 2020, Germany’s top prosecutor said on Thursday.
Syrian Man Charged with Murder
The Office of the Federal Prosecutor (GBA) charged that the man, identified only as Abdullah A.H.H. under German privacy laws, targeted the victims with a knife and acted out of “radical Islamic” extremist views.
The man is charged with stabbing the tourists, aged 55 and 53, killing one and seriously injuring the other.
According to the GBA, the suspect had intended to kill both men on October 4 for being what he viewed as “infidels.”
“The suspect acted out of a radical Islamist disposition,” according to the GBA. “He chose to punish both his victims with death for being representatives of an ‘infidel’ social order whose freedom and openness he had rejected,” the GBA charged.
The suspect was arrested about two weeks after the attack and has been held in custody since.
In addition to murder, he faces charges of attempted murder and causing serious bodily harm.
According to Dresden authorities, the suspect was 20 years old at the time of the crime and had been in Germany since 2015.
Abdullah A.H.H. first came to Germany in 2015 and applied for asylum.
Although his application was rejected, he was able stay in Germany under the so-called “tolerated” status, which German authorities give to rejected asylum seekers who cannot be deported.
Dresden Knife Attack
A knife attack that killed one tourist and seriously injured another in the German city of Dresden in early October is being treated as a terrorist attack, prosecutors said Wednesday.
A 20-year-old Syrian man was arrested on Tuesday evening and is believed to have an Islamist background, federal prosecutors in the city of Karlsruhe said, just days after the shocking Islamist beheading of a teacher in France.
The suspect allegedly attacked the two tourists, who had travelled together from North Rhine-Westphalia, on October 4.
One of them, a 55-year-old man, later died from his injuries in hospital. The other, aged 53, survived with serious injuries.
“This act once again demonstrates the danger of Islamist violence,” Interior Minister Horst Seehofer said in a statement.
“Whatever the form of extremism and terrorism, the utmost vigilance is called for,” he said.
The suspect has a long criminal record including charges of soliciting support for a foreign terrorist organisation, obtaining instructions to commit a serious act of violence endangering the state, bodily injury and threats.
He came to Germany in 2015 along with hundreds of thousands of Syrian migrants and had become increasingly radicalized since 2017, when police classified him as dangerous, according to a report in Der Spiegel magazine.
He had been living in Germany under “tolerated” status granted to people whose asylum requests have been rejected, but who cannot be deported.
He had only recently been released from a juvenile detention center, on September 29, German media reported.
Police and the public prosecutor’s office in Dresden said the examination of evidence had led to the Syrian man and “raised the question of an Islamist attack”.
A report in the Bild daily said his DNA was detected on the knife, which police found near the scene of the crime in the city centre.
The DNA was already stored in police databases, the report said.
Responding to the news on Twitter, Justice Minister Christine Lambrecht said “Islamist terror is an ongoing major threat to our society, which we must fight against with all our might”.