German Mayor Upset Migrants Being Stereotyped After Islamist Mass Stabbing

Würzburg Mayor Christian Schuchardt has written an open letter decrying the possibility that refugees and migrants may be stereotyped after a Somali refugee stabbed three women to death in the city.

Mayor Christian Schuchardt, a member of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), expressed grief over the deaths of three women and the seven others injured by a 24-year-old Somalian refugee last Friday, and commended the bravery of those who attempted to stop the attacker.

“But I also cried for our city last night. Because of this short circuit, this equating is so obvious. Refugees, immigrants, violent criminals, religious warriors and terrorists – massacres,” he said in his letter, Suddeutche Zeitung reports.

“However, the crimes of individuals can never be traced back to population groups, religions or nationalities. We Germans were not condemned in general after the Second World War either. Nor does this now apply to Somalis or refugees in general. This pigeonholing must come to an end,” Schuchardt said.

“And at the same time, there will be no end to it. This is my moral demand, my wish for the society that I know cannot be fulfilled. Because how would you feel as a foreigner in our city today?” he added.

Shortly after Friday’s fatal knife attack, the perpetrator was identified as a 24-year-old Somali national who had arrived in Germany in 2015, just months before the height of the migrant crisis.

Initially, police did not want to comment on the exact motive of the stabbing, but on Monday, Joachim Herrmann, Bavaria’s Interior Minister, stated that he saw clear indications the attack was motivated by radical Islamic extremism.

According to Minister Hermann, when the attacker reached a local hospital after the attack he had claimed that the act was a contribution toward jihad.

Radical Islamist propaganda was also found in the accommodation where the Somali lived but his two mobile phones are still being examined by investigators.

The stabbing attack comes just months after another migrant, a Syrian, stabbed two tourists in the city of Dresden in October of last year, killing one.

The suspect in the case, 20-year-old Abdullah A H H, had also come to Germany during the height of the migrant crisis and the incident was later classified as a radical Islamic terrorist attack.

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