Four days after an Afghan migrant suspect attacked an anti-Islamification rally in Germany, police have decided there was probably a religious extremist motive.
A police officer was killed and five other people, including a veteran right-wing political campaigner, were stabbed in the German city of Mannheim last week. A 25-year-old Afghan migrant is accused of having charged the setup of a political rally event in the town square with a knife in an apparent terror attack.
As ever, authorities were circumspect about attributing a motivation to the attack but now believe it is possible a knife attack by a migrant on an anti-Islamification rally may have had an “Islamist motive”. This development comes from Germany’s Federal justice minister Marco Buschmann (centrist liberal Free Democrat party, the smallest of the government coalition partners), who revealed the Federal Prosecutor General was taking over the investigation from local police, as is common with political crimes in the country.
Buschmann said the knife attack which killed a police officer and maimed anti-Mosque building activist Michael Stuerzenberger had shocked Germany, and reminded the public that anyone glorifying the act of political violence was committing a Federal offence, punishable by up to three years in prison. There is “clear evidence” of Islamist motive, he said.
The warning about glorifying the stabbing came after a viral TikTok video responding to the Mannheim killing and calling for the murder of “all ex-Muslims and every critic of Islam” hit the headlines in Germany.
The politician continued: “The danger posed by religious fanaticism and radical Islamism remains as great as ever… Islam belongs to Germany, but Islamism does not. It is a deadly form of fanaticism.”
The Federal Prosecutor’s office said, for their part, that they recognised a “special significance” in the case and they were working on the assumption that “the crime was motivated by religion”.
Germany, like the rest of the member states of the European Union, is due to vote in elections to decide the composition of the next European Parliament this week. Migration was already a key feature of the election campaign even before this latest attack by a migrant against German people, and while what impact this will have on polls is yet to be seen it has already inspired potential change in policy.
As noted by Agence France Presse, the German government is considering allowing deportations of Afghans back home, something which has been suspended since the Taliban assumed control of the country from President Joe Biden’s America in 2022. The left, which control the commanding position inside the government, aren’t so keen though.
Social democrat politician Rolf Mützenich said he felt “disgust” for people who used the attack to articulate a political point — that dangerous migrants should be deported — while his colleague Sebastian Hartmann warned against dividing the country.