The young man, a Syrian refugee, suffers from a “delirious and paranoid schizophrenia”, according to a first expertise. He had, this Saturday, wounded several people aboard a train in Bavaria.
Le Monde with AFP
The German authorities announced, Sunday, November 7, the psychiatric internment of the Syrian author of a knife attack on a train the watch that made four wounded, excluding an Islamist track.
A first assessment by an expert from the author of the aggression, a 27-year-old Syrian political refugee arrived in the country in 2014, concluded to a “delirious and paranoid schizophrenia” and a strong alteration of the responsibility criminal, the press the prosecutor of Nuremberg-Fürth in charge of the file, Gerhard Neuhof.
The young man said to feel pursued by police officers who would monitor him and seek in this way to make him mad, “said the Prosecutor, adding that he had not been the subject of any special police. It has been interned while waiting for further exams.
No element supporting Islamist motivation
“There is no element pointing towards an Islamist motivation,” said the local police officer, Sabine Nagel.
The facts had occurred on Saturday morning in a high-speed German train circulating between Bavaria (South) and Hamburg (North), with 208 passengers on board. The author of the aggression suddenly attacked passengers in a wagon, wounding at random four men aged 26 to 60, especially at the head.
Several passengers then tried to stop Syrian and lavished first aid to the wounded, according to the authorities, who paid tribute to their “civic courage”. The man has finally been arrested without resistance. A bloody knife was found on him by the police.
The investigators retrace, now, the personal path of the Syrian refugee. The day before the aggression, the man had lost his job and, in 2020, he had been sentenced for small scam business.
“This knife attack is horrible,” reacted the Minister of the Interior, Horst Seehofer. Even if the terrorist track has been ruled out, these facts intervened in a tense context in Germany, faced in recent years in several jihadist attacks.
In June, a 21-year-old Syrian claiming from the Islamic State organization was sentenced to life imprisonment for stabbing to death a homosexual and seriously injured his companion in Dresden in October 2020.