German police on Saturday arrested the man suspected of killing three people and wounding eight others in a stabbing rampage at a festival in Solingen.
“We have just arrested the true suspect,” the state’s interior minister Herbert Reul said on Saturday night.
Officers said the man being held is 26 and admitted to carrying out the attack.
Hours earlier, Islamic State claimed responsibility for the stabbings in which the suspect deliberately cut at his victims’ throats.
In a statement on its official mouthpiece Amaq, IS said the attack targeted a gathering of Christians for “the cause of Palestinians and Muslims”.
Minister-president of the German State of North Rhine Westphalia Hendrik Wüst described the attack as “an act of terror against the security and freedom of this country”.
But German interior minister Nancy Faeser, the country’s top security official, has not classified it as a terror attack.
Some 24 hours after the attack, police said they made a second arrest on Saturday evening as part of a police operation at a home for refugees in Solingen. Police said they could not provide more details on the individual or its connection to the incident.
Earlier on Saturday officers arrested a 15-year-old boy in connection to the case after he was allegedly heard talking to the suspect ahead of the brutal attack.
Police have not ruled out terrorism as the motive behind the death of two men, aged 67 and 56, and a woman, aged 56. Five of the eight people wounded in the attack are in serious condition, police said at a press conference on Saturday afternoon.
Elite officers in Germany stormed a refugee shelter, with the Bild newspaper reporting that a Syrian was arrested in the raid.
The newspaper stressed that information was initial and unconfirmed but reported the asylum seeker accommodation was just 300 metres from the Fronhof, the market square which was the site of the attack.
It was also just 150 metres from where investigators found the suspected murder weapon on Saturday afternoon.
Police tracking dogs led officers from where the knife was found to the refugee shelter. Special units surrounded the building before storming it at 8.18pm local time.
Terror expert Peter Neumann from London’s King’s College told Bild that claims on Amaq were “95 per cent credible”.
“The next 12 hours will be very relevant,” he said.
Officers said they had reviewed social media footage of the bloody attack and that the killer could also face eight charges of attempted murder.
“After evaluating the initial images, we are assuming that it was a very targeted attack on the neck,” said Thorsten Fleiß, the police director at the press conference.
Markus Caspers, the chief public prosecutor, said investigators currently see no other motive than terrorism.
Mr Caspers said two witnesses had overheard a conversation between the youth who was arrested on Saturday morning and another person shortly before the stabbings.
It is unclear if the other person was the suspect but police acted after the witnesses reported what they had heard to investigators.
Officers have seized several knives and are investigating whether they are the murder weapon. The Bild newspaper reported the murder weapon had been found about 200 metres from where the attack took place.
Police said the situation was fluid and they were chasing “many leads”.
Dusseldorf Police said: “Various police measures, including searches at various locations, are being carried out in parallel.
“Investigations and searches for possible further perpetrators and reasons for the offence are in full swing.”
Markus Röhrl, the Wuppertal police chief, said he would not recommend the public locking themselves up at home.
“Everyone has to decide for themselves whether they go to festivities, whether they go to football matches, whether they use public transport. The consequence of saying no to all of this would be that they would have to lock themselves in their homes. I can’t recommend that to anyone. Quite the opposite.” he said.
The incident occurred at about 9.40pm local time (8.40pm UK) on Friday when the man attacked multiple people with a knife, the police said.
Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, said on X: “The perpetrator must be quickly caught and punished to the fullest extent of the law.”
Ms Faeser said earlier that security authorities were doing everything they could to catch the perpetrator and investigate the background of the attack.
The attack occurred at the Fronhof, where live bands were playing. It was during a festival marking the 650th anniversary of the city in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, which borders the Netherlands.
The German musician, who goes by the name Topic, said he was playing on a nearby stage when the incident occurred. He was told about what happened but was asked to continue “to avoid causing a mass panic attack”, he posted on Instagram.
He was eventually told to stop, and “since the attacker was still on the run, we hid in a nearby store while police helicopters circled above us”, Topic wrote.
Authorities cancelled the remainder of the weekend festival.
The perpetrator aimed specifically for peoples’ throats, one police spokesman said. A second spokesman later would not confirm or deny that detail and pointed to a news conference scheduled for the afternoon.
Fatal stabbings and shootings are relatively uncommon in Germany. The government said earlier this month it wanted to toughen rules on knives that can be carried in public by reducing the maximum length allowed.
In June, a 29-year-old policeman died after being stabbed in Mannheim during an attack on a right-wing demonstration. A stabbing attack on a train in 2021 injured several.
Herbert Reul, the interior minister of North Rhine-Westphalia, visited the scene early on Saturday. He told reporters it was a targeted attack on human life but declined to speculate on the motive.
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