After the attack in a Duisburg gym, the federal prosecutor took over the investigation. The reason is the special importance of the case, said a spokeswoman for the Karlsruhe authority on Friday of the dpa. There are indications of a possible Islamist motive. No further information is currently being given and the investigation is ongoing.
On Thursday, the Düsseldorf public prosecutor’s office informed that the alleged perpetrator is now also suspected of having fatally injured a person near the gym a few days earlier. The 26-year-old Syrian is said to have inflicted a significant number of stab and cut wounds on a man on the night of Easter Sunday. The 35-year-old was injured so badly that he died a few hours later. Four people were seriously injured in the gym last Tuesday.
The chief criminal director Peter Mosch said on Thursday in the interior committee of the North Rhine-Westphalian state parliament that there were no indications of further actions by the accused at the moment. The man is in custody. Special police units arrested him on Sunday night after information from two acquaintances in his apartment near the gym. He is silent on the allegations. His presumed motives are still unclear, said NRW Interior Minister Herbert Reul (CDU) in the Interior Committee in Düsseldorf. The suspect’s silence is “atypical for an assassin who wants to classify his crime” and also for a gunman who, in his view, has nothing left to lose.
On Tuesday, the investigators had expressed the suspicion that the knife attack in the gym could have been a terrorist attack. There are indications of an Islamist motivation for the arrested Syrian, spokesmen for the Düsseldorf public prosecutor’s office had announced. This was the result of the analysis of the suspect’s mobile phone. The authorities had been in contact with the federal prosecutor for some time. According to earlier information from the police and public prosecutor’s office, the Syrian had applied for asylum in Germany in April 2016. In 2018 he was noticed in two cases of minor property crimes. Both procedures have been discontinued.