At least three people were killed and eight others seriously wounded in a knife attack at a festival in the western German city of Solingen on Friday night, authorities said.
The attack occurred shortly after 9:30 p.m. local time on the city’s central square, where musicians were performing on a stage to celebrate Solingen’s 650th anniversary. Witnesses alerted police, reporting that an unknown assailant had stabbed several people.
“This evening, we in Solingen are all in shock. We all wanted to celebrate our city’s anniversary together and now have dead and wounded to lament,” the city’s mayor Tim Kurzbach said in a Facebook post. “It breaks my heart that an attack on our city happened,” he added.
Local media reported that the assailant stabbed several people at random. Police confirmed that the suspect is on the run and that a manhunt is underway.
Herbert Reul, the Interior Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia state, visited the scene early Saturday and gave a figure of eight injured. Initially, five people had been reported as injured.
“None of us knows why” the attack took place, Reul said. “I can’t say anything about the motive now.” It isn’t clear who the assailant was, he said, but the attacker left the scene “relatively quickly.”
The Festival of Diversity, marking the city’s 650th anniversary, was scheduled to run through Sunday but has now been cancelled. The festival, which began Friday, featured several stages in the city’s central streets, offering attractions such as live music, cabaret, and acrobatics.
Solingen, with a population of about 160,000 residents, is located near Cologne and Düsseldorf.
Germany’s top security official, Interior Minister Nancy Faeser, recently proposed toughening weapons laws to allow only knives with a blade measuring up to 6 centimetres to be carried in public, rather than 12 centimetres, which is currently allowed. This proposal, which has not yet been implemented, comes in the wake of several recent knife attacks in Germany.
