Three people were killed and four more were seriously wounded during a stabbing spree at the Festival of Diversity in the German city of Solingen on Friday evening, police said. The sole suspect remains at large.
According to eyewitnesses, the perpetrator started attacking people at random at around 9:45pm local time at Solingen’s Fronhof Square, where many had arrived to celebrate the city’s 650th anniversary.
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Police have declared a manhunt for the suspect, who had fled the scene. “We currently have no information about his whereabouts,” a police spokesman said.
The police have not provided any description of the suspect. According to Bild, eyewitnesses described the perpetrator as “an Arab-looking man.”
The crime scene has been cordoned off, with heavily armed officers and multiple ambulances present in the area.
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“We are all in shock,” Solingen Mayor Tim Kurzbach said. “We had wanted to celebrate our city’s anniversary together, and now we have to mourn the dead and the injured.”
Solingen, a city with a population of nearly 160,000, is located in Germany’s western North Rhine-Westphalia state, not far from the larger cities of Dusseldorf and Cologne.
Germany has seen several stabbing attacks in recent years. In 2021, a Somali national armed with a kitchen knife killed three people inside a store in Wurzburg. In June 2024, an Afghan asylum-seeker attacked people at a small rally organized by an anti-Islamist group in Mannheim. He injured six people, including a police officer who later succumbed to his wounds.