FRANKFURT—German police said they were holding a 26-year-old Syrian man in custody on Sunday after a knife attack in the city of Solingen in which three people were killed and eight injured, adding that they were looking into the suspect’s possible links with the ISIS terrorist group.
The attack occurred during a festival on Friday evening in a market square where live bands were playing to celebrate Solingen’s 650-year history. Mourners made a makeshift memorial near the scene.
The suspect turned himself in late on Saturday and admitted to the crime, Duesseldorf police and prosecutors said in a joint statement early on Sunday.
German federal prosecutors identified the Syrian man as Issa Al H., omitting his family name because of German privacy laws, and said he was suspected of being a member of ISIS.
Prosecutors said “due to his radical Islamist convictions” he tried to kill as many people as possible that he considered to be non-believers, stabbing them repeatedly in the neck and upper body.
Friedrich Merz, a prominent politician who leads the opposition CDU party, said the country should stop admitting further refugees from Syria and Afghanistan.
“It’s enough!” he said in a letter on his website.
The suspect came from a home for refugees in Solingen that was searched on Saturday, North Rhine-Westphalia’s interior minister, Herbert Reul, said.
ISIS described the man who carried out the attack as a soldier of ISIS in a statement on its Telegram account on Saturday.
On Sunday, the group posted two clips on its Telegram account of what it said was the attacker. The first purportedly showed the masked man pledging allegiance to the ISIS leader, and the second, in which his face was blurred, allegedly showed him speaking moments before the attack.
Hendrik Wuest, premier of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia where Solingen is located, on Saturday described the attack as an act of terror.
Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) has said there have been around a dozen Islamist-motivated attacks since 2000. One of the biggest was in 2016, when a Tunisian drove a truck into a Christmas market in Berlin, killing 12 and injuring dozens.
“The risk of jihadist-motivated acts of violence remains high. The Federal Republic of Germany remains a direct target of terrorist organizations,” the BKA said in the report earlier this year.