The German police late Saturday made a third arrest in the fatal knife attack that took place Friday at a street festival in the western city of Solingen. An official said they had ended the search for a suspect in the stabbing episode, which killed three and injured several more, some of them seriously.
“The one we’ve been looking for all day is just now with us in custody,” the official, Herbert Reul, the state interior minister of North Rhine-Westphalia, said in an interview Saturday with a German broadcaster.
He cautioned that the investigation was still in its early stages. “This is someone we’ve suspected to the highest degree, but of course everything still has to be checked,” Mr. Reul said. “This all just happened.”
The authorities had earlier arrested two people who were later determined unlikely to have been the real attackers, he told ARD, the broadcaster.
The person now arrested is believed to have lived in a refugee shelter, Mr. Reul said, adding that the motive was still under investigation. The police had found evidence linked to the attack along with the suspect, he said, without specifying what kind.
At a news conference held on Saturday before the arrest, officials said that they had not ruled out a terrorist attack because no other explanation for the seemingly random violence made sense. The federal prosecutor’s office is on standby to take over the case, should the authorities conclude that the attack was a terrorist act.
Shortly after 9:30 p.m. on Friday, the attacker started stabbing people who had gathered at the festival to celebrate the 650th anniversary of Solingen — a city famous for its knives and scissors. The attack occurred during a live music performance, not far from a temporary stage set up for the event, which was billed as a “Festival of Diversity.”
The police said it appeared that the attacker had chosen victims from the crowd at random and that he appeared to have targeted his victims’ necks.
The festival, originally planned to run through Sunday, was immediately canceled as emergency workers tended to the injured and the police tried to get a handle on the situation.
On Saturday, the police said a woman and a man, both 57, and another man, 67, had been killed. They did not give further details. Eight others were injured, including four who remained in critical condition.
Well before the police apprehended a suspect, or confirmed any circulating descriptions, members of Germany’s far-right AfD party, which has made violent crimes committed by young male immigrants one of its main talking points, reacted sharply.
Tino Chrupalla, a leader of the far-right AfD, wrote in a post on X: “A ban on knives will not help to prevent such situations. Germany needs an immediate change in its migration and security policy!”
The anti-immigrant party is poised to make gains in three state elections next month.
Just three months ago, an Afghan citizen who had been living in Germany for years attacked an anti-immigrant rally with a knife and killed a police officer in the city of Mannheim, 130 miles to the south.
Solingen, home to more than 150,000 people, is just east of Düsseldorf, the capital of Germany’s most populous state, North Rhine-Westphalia.
Solingen is a diverse city that has benefited from foreign workers since the guest worker programs of the 1960s brought foreign workers to the city’s many blade manufacturers. More than 20 percent of the city’s residents are not German citizens, and thousands more hold dual citizenship.
The city was the site of one of the most traumatizing racist attacks in postwar Germany, in 1993, when a group of young neo-Nazis set fire to a house inhabited by a Turkish family. Five people were killed, including three children, and 17 people were injured.
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