Germany | “Terrorist act” “not excluded” in Solingen knife attack

(Wuppertal) Investigators in Germany are not ruling out the possibility of a “terrorist-motivated act” in the deadly knife attack at a party in Solingen, in the west of the country, on Friday evening, the Düsseldorf prosecutor general said on Saturday.

The perpetrator has not yet been identified and is still being sought, the police and the prosecution added at a press conference.

“We have not been able to identify a motive so far, but we assume, in view of all the circumstances, that the initial suspicion of a terrorist-motivated act cannot be ruled out,” prosecutor Markus Caspers told reporters.

The three people killed were two men aged 56 and 67 and a 56-year-old woman. Police reduced the number of seriously injured to four, down from five previously.

“These are completely unknown victims, who have no connection with each other – and so we conclude from these circumstances that this could possibly be a terrorist act,” Caspers stressed.

“No other motive is evident at this time,” he added.

“After analyzing the first images, we assume that it was a very targeted attack on the neck” of the victims, police chief Thorsten Fleiss said at the press conference.

The perpetrator of the attack “has not yet been identified,” the prosecutor said.

The person whose arrest police announced earlier Saturday was a 15-year-old boy suspected of “failure to report” a criminal act, Caspers said. Investigators are examining whether he may have been connected to the attacker.

A police representative said that numerous testimonies had been filed since Friday evening, with “descriptions that differ in part from one another”, making it impossible at this stage to draw up a composite portrait of the main suspect on the run.

According to police representative Thorsten Fleiss, investigators seized several knives during their initial investigations, but they are not yet able to say whether the murder weapon is among them.