Germany: New knife attack in Mannheim injures local AfD politician

Five days after the fatal stabbing of a police officer on Mannheim’s market square, a local politician was attacked in the German city of Mannheim.

The man, described as a local election candidate for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), suffered cuts in the attack, the German Press Agency reported.

Police confirmed that the incident occurred on Tuesday evening near the scene of a deadly attack on the organizers of a rally against radical Islam on Friday, in which a 29-year-old police officer was killed.

They said the politician was taken to hospital for treatment but did not suffer life-threatening injuries.

The AfD local association announced that its candidate had chased after a man who had torn down election posters and then injured him with a knife.

Senior AfD politicians identified the victim of Tuesday’s attack as Heinrich Koch, 62, a candidate in this weekend’s local elections in Mannheim.

Police in the southwestern state of Baden-Württemberg said they had arrested a 25-year-old suspect and taken him to a psychiatric clinic after he showed clear signs of mental illness.

They stressed that there was no concrete evidence that he knew that the victim was an AfD politician.

The latest incident in Mannheim occurred after an Afghan asylum seeker was arrested on suspicion of stabbing a police officer multiple times. The officer later died in hospital. Five other people were injured in the attack as they prepared to attend a rally organized by a group opposed to radical Islam.

The murder sparked outrage in Germany and prompted the government to say it could allow deportations to Afghanistan.

The 25-year-old suspect in Friday’s attack is said to have come to Germany as a refugee in 2013 and now has two children. Deportations to Afghanistan were stopped when the Taliban returned to power three years ago.

The violence comes ahead of the European elections in Germany on Sunday and local elections in seven federal states, including Baden-Württemberg.

All 27 EU countries are taking part in the European elections. The AfD is challenging Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s centre-left Social Democrats for second place, although the far-right party’s top candidates have been rocked by a series of scandals.

“We are shocked and dismayed,” Markus Frohnmaier, a high-ranking AfD official in Baden-Württemberg, told German media in response to the latest incident.

Attacks also occurred in other parts of Germany in the run-up to Sunday’s European elections, prompting the Chancellor to warn last month of a threat to democracy.

In Dresden, Scholz’s candidate Matthias Ecke was seriously injured by a group of people while hanging up posters, and a Green politician was also attacked.

Berlin Senator Franziska Giffey, a well-known former minister from Scholz’s party, was hit on the head and neck by a man last month while visiting a local library in the capital.