Woman arrested after 17 people injured in knife attack at Hamburg train station

 

Woman arrested after 17 people injured in knife attack at Hamburg train station

 

Four victims critically wounded in attack by 39-year-old alleged assailant in Germany’s second-largest city

 

Guardian staff and agencies in Berlin

Fri 23 May 2025 19.17 BST

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/may/23/hamburg-train-station-stabbing-attack-germany

 

German police have arrested a woman after 17 people were injured in a knife attack at Hamburg’s main railway station.

 

The attack happened at about 6.30pm local time (5.30pm BST), with Hamburg police saying on social media that they were carrying out a major operation in Germany’s second-largest city.

 

They later confirmed a 39-year-old German woman had been arrested and said that she was thought to have “acted alone”.

 

Late on Friday, Hamburg’s fire service said 17 people were hurt in total – four of them with life-threatening injuries, another six with serious injuries and seven with light injuries, German news agency dpa reported.

 

There did not appear to be any political motive for the attack, police said.

 

“We have no evidence so far that the woman may have had a political motive,” local police spokesperson Florian Abbenseth told journalists at the scene, in comments broadcast by ARD public television.

 

Police were instead pursuing the theory that the suspect may have “been experiencing a psychological emergency”.

 

The office of the chancellor, Friedrich Merz, said the German leader was appalled by the news and told Hamburg’s mayor, Peter Tschentscher, in a phone call yesterday evening that his “thoughts are with the victims and their relatives”.

 

The suspect was thought to have carried out the attack “against passengers” at the station, a spokesperson for the Hanover federal police directorate, which also covers Hamburg, told AFP earlier on Friday.

 

Images of the scene showed access to the platforms at one end of the station blocked off by police and people being loaded into waiting ambulances.

 

Later images showed forensics teams carefully examining the station.

 

Some of the victims in the attack were being treated onboard waiting trains in the station, Bild reported shortly after the attack.

 

The German rail operator Deutsche Bahn said on social media that four platforms at the station had been closed.

 

The incident would lead to “delays and diversions in long-distance services”, the rail operator said.

 

Germany has been rocked in recent months by a series of violent attacks with often jihadist or far-right extremist motivations that have put security at the top of the agenda.

 

In the most recent attack, four people were injured in a stabbing at a bar in the city of Bielefeld in north-west Germany, on Sunday.