A 33-year-old man arrested on suspicion of fatally stabbing two teenagers and wounding five other passengers on a train in northern Germany had been released from pretrial detention a week ago and had previous criminal convictions, investigation officials said Thursday. .
The man, identified as Ibrahim A., a stateless Palestinian who arrived in Germany in 2014, allegedly stabbed several people to death on Wednesday afternoon on a regional train traveling from Kiel to Hamburg. A 17-year-old girl and a 19-year-old man died from their injuries, authorities said.
Two victims were still in life-threatening condition and two others were seriously injured. One person was slightly injured, police said.
Other passengers overwhelmed the suspect, who was treated at a hospital for minor injuries and is in police custody, local police said at a news conference in Kiel.
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Police and prosecutors said the suspect’s criminal record included convictions for another stabbing incident, sexual assault, grievous bodily harm and shoplifting. Germany’s dpa news agency said he had been in pretrial detention for a year for another knife crime in Hamburg, before being released a week ago.
Before being searched in Kiel, the suspect also lived in Hamburg and in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia.
Police and prosecutors were investigating possible motives for the attack, which occurred as the train was approaching the town of Brokstedt.
Deutsche Bahn security guards stand on the platform of the Brokstedt station at sunrise in Brokstedt, Germany, on January 26, 2023.
Several media outlets reported that the attacker chased the passengers through different train cars and that traces of blood could be found in four of them. Some passengers tried to defend themselves by throwing their suitcases at him, German news channel n-tv reported.
Sabine Suetterlin-Waack, interior minister for the state of Schleswig-Holstein, where Brokstedt is based, said the parents of the two teenage victims had been informed of their deaths. Not all of the other injured victims had been identified as of noon Thursday, she said.
“Due to the very dynamic course of the crime, much is not clear,” the minister said. The results of an interrogation of the alleged perpetrator did not yet exist, so investigators cannot yet say anything about the motive.
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She said investigators were working under a lot of pressure to “get all the facts together.”
The state parliament began its session on Thursday with a minute’s silence for the victims of the attack.
