SHARE
COPY LINK

CRIME

UPDATED: German knife rampage suspect moves to psychiatric care

The alleged perpetrator of a knife attack on a university campus in Mann was on Saturday transferred to psychiatric care, as one victim fought for her life in hospital, prosecutors said.

Police emergency vehicles parked in front of the Hamm-Lippstadt University of Applied Sciences building where a 34-year-old man attacked several people with a knife and injured four people on 10th June 2022.
Police emergency vehicles parked in front of the Hamm-Lippstadt University of Applied Sciences building where a 34-year-old man attacked several people with a knife and injured four people on 10th June 2022. Photo: Festim Beqiri/TV7NEWS/dpa

Three women and one man were injured in the incident on Friday, before other students managed to restrain the attacker at the Hamm-Lippstadt University of Applied Sciences.

The 34-year-old suspect, who had been armed with two kitchen knives, “randomly selected” the victims, Dortmund prosecutors’ office spokesman Henner Kruse told reporters.

A 30-year-old assistant professor who was among those attacked while attending a conference was in hospital in a critical condition and doctors feared the worst. 

A 22-year-old student had suffered eight stab wounds to the stomach and needed emergency surgery, but her condition was not life threatening.

The other two victims, a 22-year-old man and another young woman of the same age, were less seriously injured, he added.

The suspect, a student at the university in the western German city of Hamm, said after the attack that he had felt threatened by a group of students who, according to him, wanted to “annihilate him”.

He was possibly suffering from “paranoid schizophrenia” and “hallucinations”, Kruse said, adding that he had a long history of treatment for mental health problems.

The police had ruled out any political or religious motives for the attack and an investigation for attempted murder and serious injury had been opened against him.

The WDR broadcaster, has reported that the suspect released himself from a psychiatric ward shortly before the stabbings, where he had been treated after a suicide attempt. He was in the psychiatric ward voluntarily because of self-harm and not by force or by a police order.

On Friday, the Ham police force wrote on Twitter that they were conducting a “major operation” in the area of the Hamm-Lippstadt University of Applied Sciences, asking people to avoid the area. The Dortmund police force have since taken over the investigation.

According to the WDR broadcaster, the 34-year-old suspect went into the university building around 3:30pm on Friday. He attacked students with a knife in the corridors and then headed for a larger lecture hall with a lecture in progress, where students managed to restrain him. 

The first emergency services were on site just three minutes after the first emergency calls. Students held the suspect until the police arrived, WDR reported.

It is unclear whether the university will open as usual on Monday.

“We can’t imagine going back to normal standard operations on Monday. That wouldn’t be appropriate either,” the chancellor of the university, Sandra Schlösser, told WDR.

Member comments

Log in here to leave a comment.
Become a Member to leave a comment.

ANTI-SEMITISM

Germany sees sharp rise in anti-Semitic acts

Anti-Semitic acts rose sharply in Germany last year, especially after war broke out between Israel and Hamas in Gaza in October, according to new figures released on Tuesday.

Germany sees sharp rise in anti-Semitic acts

The Federal Association of Research and Information Centres on Anti-Semitism (RIAS) documented 4,782 anti-Semitic “incidents” in 2023 – an increase of more than 80 per cent on the previous year.

More than half of the incidents – which included threats, physical attacks and vandalism – were registered after Palestinian militant group Hamas’s unprecedented October 7th attack on Israel, RIAS said.

Germany’s domestic intelligence agency last week also published figures showing a new record in anti-Semitic crimes in 2023.

A total of 5,164 crimes were recorded during the year, the agency said, compared with 2,641 in 2022.

Anti-Semitic crimes with a “religious-ideological motivation” jumped to 492 from just 33 the previous year, with the vast majority committed after October 7.

Felix Klein, the government’s commissioner for the fight against anti-Semitism, said the RIAS figures were “absolutely catastrophic”.

The Hamas attack had acted as an “accelerant” for anti-Semitism in Germany, he told a press conference in Berlin.

“Jewish life in Germany is under greater threat than it has ever been since the Federal Republic of Germany was founded,” he said.

The Hamas attack resulted in the deaths of 1,195 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures.

Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 37,600 people, also mostly civilians, Gaza’s health ministry said.

Islamophobic incidents also increased dramatically in Germany last year, according to a separate report published on Monday.

The CLAIM alliance against Islamophobia said it had registered 1,926 attacks on Muslims in 2023, compared with just under 900 in 2023.

These included verbal abuse, discrimination, physical violence and damage to property.

SHOW COMMENTS