Germany: Holocaust Memorial attacker shares Islamic State ideology, Berlin says

The alleged perpetrator of the knife attack on a Spanish tourist at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin on Friday evening shares the ideology of the Islamic State group, the German federal prosecutor's office said on Monday, February 24. The suspect, presented as Wassim AI M., a 19-year-old Syrian refugee, "acted on the basis of a radical Islamist and anti-Semitic conviction" and "against liberal German society," the prosecutor's office, which is responsible for terrorism cases, said in a statement.

The institution has therefore taken over the case from the Berlin public prosecutor's office and opened a preliminary investigation for attempted murder and serious injury. On Friday, the suspect attacked a 30-year-old Spanish tourist visiting the memorial's field of steles from behind, seriously injuring him in the neck. The victim's life was saved after emergency surgery. He then fled before returning three hours later to the scene of the attack where he went towards the police who noticed his hands and pants stained with blood, leading to his arrest. According to the authorities, the suspect "had been planning to kill Jews for several weeks" and "it is in this context that the crime scene was chosen" .

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Investigators found a prayer mat, a Koran and a sheet of paper with verses from the Koran in his backpack, "which suggests a religious motivation" for his act. The attack was committed two days before the German legislative elections , in a climate already tense following a series of deadly attacks by foreigners. Inaugurated in 2005 in the heart of the capital near the Brandenburg Gate and the US embassy, ​​the Memorial commemorates, with more than two thousand concrete steles, the memory of the millions of Jews exterminated by the Third Reich.