Teenager
attacks passengers with axe and knife on train in Germany
Local
police confirm attacker was shot dead after fleeing train, with three
people sustaining serious injuries
Philip Oltermann in
Berlin and Kevin Rawlinson
Tuesday 19 July 2016
00.40 BST
A teenager armed
with an axe and a knife has attacked around 20 passengers on a train
in northern Bavaria, according to local police.
Three people were
seriously hurt and one person sustained light injuries before the
attacker was shot dead by police, a police spokesman said on Monday
evening.
Bavaria’s interior
minister, Joachim Herrmann, said the attacker was a 17-year-old
Afghan asylum seeker who had arrived in Germany as an unaccompanied
minor and had been living with a foster family in Ochsenfurt, south
of Würzburg, for “a few months”.
After passengers
managed to alert the driver, the train was stopped in the
Heidingsfeld district of Würzburg, and the attacker had initially
managed to flee from the carriage on foot, Herrmann said.
A police taskforce
that happened to be in the vicinity then pursued the attacker,
shooting dead the 17-year-old, who was carrying an axe and a knife
when he had attacked members of the unit.
Asked whether the
attack had an Islamist background, Herrmann said one witness inside
the train said the teenager had shouted “Allahu Akbar” during the
assault. The report was being investigated.
The man reportedly
attacked passengers on the regional train travelling between the town
of Treuchtlingen and Würzburg. Fourteen other passengers were
reportedly in a state of shock and receiving treatment by
specialists.
The interior
ministry could not confirm whether some of the victims were in a
life-threatening condition.
The train line
between Ochsenfurt and Würzburg remained closed while police
investigated. Police initially said there was no indication of a
motive, and they were treating the attacker as a lone individual,
citing witness reports.
Germany, which has
been at the heart of the refugee crisis over the last year, has not
seen any attacks with an explicit terrorist motive. In November a
football friendly between Germany and Holland in Hanover was
cancelled after a terrorist attack tip-off, with interior minister
Thomas de Maiziére saying there had been a “concrete threat” of
an attack.
In the aftermath of
the terrorist attack in Brussels in March, German foreign minister
Frank-Walter Steinmeier appealed to citizens to keep a “cool head”.
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“The terrorists
would like to carry their war into our cities and into our heads, to
create a kind of permanent siege, to force their perverse logic of
violence and hatred on us”, the social democrat politician said.
“We would do our best not to play along with this game”.
About 1.2 million
refugees are estimated to be living in Germany. Latest estimates by
the European commission put the number of asylum seekers in Europe by
the end of 2017 at around 3 million.
According to a study
published in April by Germany’s Friedrich Ebert Foundation, around
154,000 Afghan citizens migrated to Germany in 2015, of whom 32,000
applied for asylum. More than 120,000 Afghan citizens remained in
Germany without authorisation or had moved on to other countries,
according to the study.
The study found that
most Afghan migrants were young and male. The majority of family
members who were interviewed for the survey said they had fled their
country because of the economic situation. Political developments in
Europe or the open-border policy of the chancellor, Angela Merkel, at
the height of the refugee crisis had played only a minor role in
encouraging Afghans to leave their country, the study found.
Germany, while
initially generally welcoming refugees, has since begun to take a
much tougher line, declaring it would deport Afghan asylum seekers
whose applications are rejected.
Earlier in the year,
Afghans were the second largest group entering the European Union,
with 178,230 Afghans seeking asylum in the EU’s 28 states in 2015.
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