Prosecutors suspect religious motive – DW – 04.06.2024

The Federal Prosecutor’s Office suspects a religious motive behind the knife attack at an anti-Islam rally in Mannheim on Friday, in which a police officer was killed.

The Federal Prosecutor General, Germany’s highest law enforcement authority responsible for terrorism, espionage and international criminal law, is taking over the case because of its “special importance,” a spokeswoman said on Monday.

She said the alleged attacker, a 25-year-old Afghan national who has lived in Germany for nine years and was shot by police and is still in hospital, was trying to prevent critics of Islam from exercising their right to freedom of expression.

The suspect, who reportedly had no previous convictions and was not known to German law enforcement authorities, faces possible charges of murder, attempted murder and five counts of grievous bodily harm.

“Clear indications of an Islamist motive”

Justice Minister Marco Buschmann of the FDP, the business-friendly junior partner in the current German coalition government, wrote on the social network X (formerly Twitter) that there were “clear indications of an Islamist motive”.

He added: “Islam belongs to Germany, but Islamism does not.” And he said: “The danger posed by religious fanaticism and radical Islamism remains great.”

Other FDP politicians called on the Muslim population to become more involved in fighting extremism.

“Islamic groups and clergy cannot evade the fight against Islamism,” Konstantin Kuhle, chairman of the FDP parliamentary group, told German media on Tuesday.

Mannheim: Thousands gather to mourn

Meanwhile, around 8,000 people gathered in Mannheim on Monday to pay their last respects to the 29-year-old police officer who succumbed to his stab wounds on Sunday.

The event was organized by a broad cross-section of Mannheim society, including Christian, Muslim and Jewish clergy as well as local politicians.

“The death of this young man fills us all with sadness, tears us apart and leaves us speechless,” said the local Catholic deacon Karl Jung, while Mustafa Aydinli, imam of the Muslim community in Mannheim, called on citizens to stick together because “God wants us to live in peace.”

Scholz gives a speech in parliament on security

After Chancellor Olaf Scholz said on Sunday that he was “deeply dismayed” by the police officer’s death, he is due to make a statement on national security before the German Bundestag on Thursday, according to a letter from the Chancellery seen by the DPA news agency.

However, it is unclear whether the topic of Scholz’s speech will be internal security following the attack in Mannheim or foreign policy following his recent decision to allow Ukraine to use German weapons to attack military targets within Russia’s internationally recognized borders.

High alert ahead of the European elections and the 2024 European Championship

Domestically, Germany has been on heightened alert for possible Islamist attacks since the outbreak of war between Israel and Hamas on October 7, 2023.

With a view to the European elections on 9 June and the start of the European Football Championship in Germany a week later, the head of the German domestic intelligence service warned that the risk of such attacks was “real and as high as it has been for a long time”.

Federal Finance Minister Christian Lindner (FDP) told the daily newspaper Picture “We must resolutely defend ourselves against Islamist terrorism,” while Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock (Greens) called on her colleagues not to exploit the attack to demand stricter migration laws.

“If the aim of extremists, be they right-wing extremists or Islamists, is to divide a free society, then the answer must be that we as a society react to it together,” she said at an event organized by the local Rheinische Post Newspaper on Monday evening.

“Of course, this affected me deeply,” she said of the attack in Mannheim, but at the same time called on German society and democracy “not to allow themselves to be destroyed by hatred, violence and murderous intent.”

mf/rmt (AFP, dpa, Reuters, KNA)