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According to German media, the suspect is Farhad N., who was born in Kabul and arrived in Germany at the end of 2016. His asylum application had been rejected, but he was granted subsidiary protection, suspending his deportation. According to information from Spiegel, he posted messages of an Islamist nature before committing the act.
10 days before the elections
This attack comes in the middle of the election campaign ahead of the German legislative elections on February 23, already dominated by questions of immigration and insecurity, where the extreme right could more than double its 2021 score to more than 20%, according to the latest polls.
At around 10:30 a.m., the suspect approached from behind, in a Mini Cooper car, the procession of a demonstration organized at the call of the Verdi service union, according to the police.
He then overtook a police vehicle which was bringing up the rear and drove into the rear of the procession, causing scenes of desolation in his wake, the police added.
Injured children
According to the latest report, 28 people were injured, several of them ‘very seriously’, some still fighting between life and death. Children are among them. On the road, strewn with various scattered objects, an overturned child’s stroller was visible.
“It is probably an attack,” reacted the head of the regional government of Bavaria, Markus Söder, also speaking of “circumstances similar” to those in Magdeburg at the end of December: a Saudi with refugee status, suffering from psychiatric problems, had driven a car into the crowd at a Christmas market, killing six and injuring some 300.
Not related to the Munich conference
Denouncing a “horrible” act, Chancellor Olaf Scholz told reporters that “this criminal cannot count on any leniency. He must be punished and must leave the country.”
According to local authorities, this act does not appear to be linked to the Munich Security Conference which opens on Friday and brings together, as it does every year, the world’s elite in defence and diplomacy.
The act is, however, likely to further inflame the German election campaign, already marked by a very strong polarization on the questions of immigration and internal security.
One of the leading figures of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, Björn Höcke, has already called on X, after the Munich attack, to “vote against the cartel parties”, as he calls the established formations of the current centre-left government of Chancellor Olaf Scholz or of the conservative and liberal opposition.
“We must put an end to the disintegration of the German state,” he added, denouncing the presence of hundreds of thousands of Afghans in Germany, many of whom came to escape the Taliban.
The AfD is in second place in the polls for the legislative elections with 20% of voting intentions, behind the conservatives (30%). The extreme right and the German conservatives denounce the laxity in their eyes of the government in the face of insecurity, after several recent murderous acts, which have provoked strong emotion in the opinion.
The trial of another Afghan, prosecuted for a knife attack in Mannheim (west) which caused the death of a police officer in spring 2024, opens on Thursday.
In Solingen, a knife attack this time attributed to a Syrian during a community festival last summer cost the lives of three people. And another knife attack, the alleged perpetrator of which was an Afghan in an irregular situation and suffering from psychiatric disorders, recently left two people dead in Bavaria, including a two-year-old boy./ATS
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