Police officers in the German town of Illerkirchberg have arrested a 27-year-old Eritrean asylum seeker accused of stabbing two young teenage girls on their way to school, killing one.
The alleged knife attack took place at 7 am on Monday morning in the town of just 4,700 people and saw the two teen girls, aged just 13 and 14, walk past an asylum home to their bus stop on their way to school where a man allegedly ran at the pair with a knife and stabbed them.
The main suspect in the stabbing, a 27-year-old Eritrean asylum seeker, is said to have stabbed 14-year-old Ece S. in the stomach and injured 13-year-old Nerea M. in the chest. The girls were later taken to a local hospital where the elder teen died of her injuries, the newspaper Bild reports.
Police were later able to arrest the Eritrean migrant who is said to have run back into the asylum home following the stabbing and officials stated that they found a knife they believe to be the murder weapon.
“There the girl was bleeding on the ground with a huge stab wound in her stomach. A second had injuries below the chest, a stab wound,” a witness to the attack told a local broadcaster.
The District Administrator of local region Alb-Donau-Kreis, Heiner Scheffold, spoke out about the attack on Tuesday morning and expressed his deep sympathies to the parents of the slain child and her seriously injured friend, but also expressed concern that an asylum seeker murdering a child in Germany was causing local sentiment towards immigrants to sour. Radio 3 Donau reports Sheffold as having said: “The shock runs deep… The fact that the perpetrator is a person who found refuge in our district is unforgivable – especially at a time when more people than ever before are fleeing to other countries for protection.
“On social media, it can already be observed how this terrible act is no longer only related to the person who committed it, but how all refugees are blamed. It is very clear to me that the attack on the two schoolgirls severely affects citizen’s sense of security”.
This is not the first major criminal incident that has been linked to this exact asylum home in Illerkirchberg. In 2019, four migrants from Iraq and Afghanistan took a 14-year-old German girl from the nearby city of Ulm to the asylum accommodation, drugged her, and then took turns raping the minor. The men involved were sentenced to only a little more than two years each by a court, Zeit reported at the time.
This case is also just the latest in which an asylum seeker has been accused of killing a teen girl in Germany since the 2015 migrant crisis. In 2016, Afghan migrant Hussein Khavari raped and murdered 19-year-old Maria Ladenberger and was found guilty of her murder in 2018 and sentenced to life in prison.
In 2018, 20-year-old failed Iraqi asylum seeker Ali Bashar was arrested for the murder of Jewish faith 14-year-old Susanna Feldman, who was found dead near railway tracks in the city of Wiesbaden.
The Iraqi initially fled Germany back to his native Iraq but was later arrested and brought back to Germany, where he confessed to the killing. He was later sentenced to life in prison in 2019 and had an appeal rejected in 2020.
Earlier this year in July, a 35-year-old Syrian migrant was arrested for the murder of 17-year-old Tabitha E. who was reported missing from her home in the town of Asperg and found dead just five days later.
Follow Chris Tomlinson on Twitter at @TomlinsonCJ or email at ctomlinson(at)breitbart.com.