Prosecutors said Wednesday that German-German authorities consider the killing of a tourist earlier this month a possible act of terror, as they detained an Islamic State supporter.
The man, a Syrian asylum seeker known to authorities as an Islamic extremist, was arrested on Tuesday and is suspected of stabbing two tourists in the eastern city of Dresden on October 4, prosecutors in Saxon State he said.
Last week, a Russian refugee demoted a high-school teacher in a city near Paris to show the carics of the Prophet Muhammad as part of a civic class about freedom of expression. That came later that week when a Pakistani man stabbed two people in Paris outside the former offices of Charlie Hebdo magazine, the site of the 2015 terrorist attack. On August 19, prosecutors said a series of apparently deliberate accidents on a Berlin highway were investigated as a possible Islamic terrorist attack.
The Islamic State witnessed major setbacks in 2019, with the defeat of the physical Khilafat and then the death of its founder and leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. But experts warned that ISIS’s ideology is strong and global revival is already underway. (Originally published on November 14, 2019) Photo: Reuters
The suspect in the Dresden attack is 20 years old and arrived in Germany in 2015 as an asylum seeker. The Dresden prosecution said he had recently been sentenced to three years for assaulting a police officer and causing bodily harm.
The federal prosecutor’s office, which is responsible for prosecuting terrorist acts, said it handled the case.
The prosecutor, identified as Abdullah Al HH, had also previously been jailed for recruiting supporters for the Islamic State and inciting violent sabotage.
Due to his age, the man was prosecuted and considered a young criminal. Prosecutors said his asylum request has been denied, but his presence in the country is being tolerated due to his age and other factors.
Germany’s Interior Minister Horst Seehofer said in a tweet, “This crime is again reminding us of the danger posed by Islam violence.”
Germany is not currently dismissing Syrian asylum seekers or those convicted of crimes as it would be because of other civilians as it considers Syria to be in a state of war.
The two victims of the Dresden attack were men from other parts of Germany, one 55 and the other 53; The prosecution said the aged man was stabbed to death in a local clinic shortly after, while the other was released after a short period of treatment and left the hospital.
A judge in Dresden issued an arrest warrant that would allow the suspect to be taken into custody as the investigation progressed. The man faces possible charges of murder, attempted murder and causing grievous bodily harm.
According to the prosecution, at a hearing on Wednesday he refused to say anything about the allegations.
In 2016, Islamic terrorist acts were perpetrated by asylum seekers in Germany, culminating in an attack on a Tunisian drug dealer and a Berlin Christmas market in which 12 people were killed and later claimed by the Islamic State.
In later years, German authorities have had to focus on the threat posed by right-wing extremists following a series of racist and anti-Jewish attacks across the country.
Authorities are still regularly detaining suspected members of Islamic militant groups – most of them among the thousands of refugees who arrived in the country in 2015 and 2016.
Write Bojan Pancevski at [email protected]
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On 22 October 2020, the printed version was printed as ‘German Killing Eyes as Terrorist Attack’.
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