The man thought responsible for a double stabbing in Germany in early October is a known Syrian Islamic extremist who arrived during the 2015 migrant crisis, released from prison just five days before the attack, it has been revealed.
Two tourists enjoying the sights in the historic city of Dresden were attacked on October 4th, both receiving critical wounds. One man survived the assault but the second succumbed to his injuries — a murder which gained comparatively little media attention in Germany and abroad at the time.
Over two weeks after the killing, police made an arrest after DNA evidence on the murder weapon led to Syrian suspect ‘Abdullah A H H’. Shockingly, it has been revealed that despite the fact Abdullah was a known extremist and had been released from a juvenile prison just five days before the attack, security services were not monitoring him.
Comments from a police press conference that took place on Thursday regarding the arrest reported by German tabloid Bild reveal the security service’s admission that they failed to monitor the 20-year-old extremist. The paper reports Abdullah had been assessed by Germany’s equivalent of the FBI and found to be a “high” risk individual after he made declarations that he wanted to launch an attack against Germany. But regardless, while the service had the option to monitor the man 24 hours a day, it did not.
In fact, Bild reports, the security service thought he would return to an ordinary non-criminal life upon release from his two-year imprisonment for a “serious criminal offence that endangers the state”. Dirk-Martin Christian, the regional head of the state intelligence service, was quoted as explaining the decision: “Such observation is very unusual in the first few days. It is assumed that people organise their lives after their release.”
Deutsche Welle reports Abdullah has a serious past of extremism, having attempted to recruit and proselytise for the Islamic State, and has previous interactions with the police for violence.
The Syrian came to Germany in 2015 — the year that German Chancellor Angela Merkel threw her nation’s borders open to the world, triggering the migrant crisis of that year — but was not granted asylum status. Instead, he is a “tolerated” foreigner, meaning while he should be deported to his native Syria, Germany does not deport migrants to Syria because it is too unsafe. So like thousands of others, he is permitted to remain indefinitely.
German police have not yet publicly revealed the radical Islamist’s motivation behind the double stabbing.
The Dresden killing came just days before another knife attack in Europe, again by a radical Muslim migrant, who beheaded a French history teacher for using cartoons of Mohammed in a lesson on freedom of expression. The attack has seen a massive kickback in France, with the government raiding individuals and organisations sympathetic to the killer, shutting down borderline extremist organisations, and even closing a mosque that shared a message calling for action against the teacher.
In a defiant show against censorious religious extremists, one French region projected enormous images of the Mohammed cartoons onto the sides of large local buildings on Wednesday night. Regional mayor Carole Delga said of the move: “There must be no weakness in the face of the enemies of democracy, facing those who transform religion into a weapon of war… those who intend to destroy the Republic.”