On Saturday evening, police made an arrest in the case but would not say whether they believed the person was the attacker.
“One man has been arrested and we are now determining how he is connected to the attack,” a spokesperson for Düsseldorf police said Saturday evening.
At a news conference Saturday afternoon, authorities said they had not ruled out a terrorist attack because no other explanation for the seemingly random violence made sense.
Police said they had detained a 15-year-old boy for questioning whom they believed might have had prior knowledge of the attack. The state attorney is not treating the youth as a suspect.
What happened?
Shortly after 9:30 p.m., the attacker started stabbing people who had gathered at the festival to celebrate Solingen’s 650th anniversary. The attack occurred during a live music performance, not far from a temporary stage set up for the event, which was billed as a “Festival of Diversity.”
Police said it appeared that the attacker had chosen victims from the crowd at random and that he appeared to have targeted at least one of the victims’ necks.
The festival, originally planned to run through Sunday, was immediately canceled as emergency workers tended to the injured and police tried to get a handle on the situation.
On Saturday, police said a woman and a man, both 57, and another man, 67, had been killed. They did not give further details. Eight were injured. Of those, four remained in critical condition.
Police have interviewed witnesses and survivors to try to reconstruct the attack and have asked the public to upload any videos or photographs of the event to the official tip site of the state police.
Early Saturday, police raided the house of the 15-year-old boy, whom several witnesses said they had overheard communicating with the suspect before the attack. The public prosecutor said the boy was being investigated for not reporting a crime.
Then Saturday evening, the German equivalent of a SWAT unit arrested a suspect in a temporary home for refugees in the vicinity of the attack. Police were trying to confirm whether the person was the attacker.
What’s next?
“Our authorities are doing everything they can to catch the perpetrator and to determine the background of the attack,” Nancy Faeser, Germany‘s interior minister, said in a statement Saturday. Officers from neighboring areas have been brought in to try to help local police find the attacker.
Federal police have also been involved in the search, authorities said Saturday. The federal prosecutor’s office, which would take over the case if it was officially deemed act of terrorism, is on standby, with two members of its staff already in Düsseldorf observing the case.
Police have so far declined to make public any details about the man, saying there were too many conflicting descriptions from witnesses. “Nothing would be more damaging than to put out a description, call on the public to help with the search and then, in the course of the investigation, discover that the person in question looks completely different after all,” Marcel Fiebig, a spokesperson for the Düsseldorf police, said during Saturday’s news conference.
That has not stopped the tabloid Bild from releasing a description of the man as a “Mediterranean type,” wearing a dark beard. Members of Germany’s far-right AfD party, which has made violent crimes committed by young male immigrants one of its main talking points, reacted swiftly.
Before police had confirmed any of the descriptions, Tino Chrupalla, a leader of the far-right AfD, wrote in a post on the social network X: “A ban on knives will not help to prevent such situations. Germany needs an immediate change in its migration and security policy!”
The anti-immigrant party is poised to make gains in three state elections next month.
Two nearby towns have also canceled public festivals that they had planned for the weekend. “We cannot celebrate when our neighboring city is mourning just a few kilometers away,” said Bettina Warnecke, the mayor of Haan, which canceled its wine festival. In comments reported by the DPA, a German news service, Warnecke noted that security was also an issue, given that police had not found the man they believed to be the attacker.
“The perpetrator must be caught quickly and punished with the full force of the law,” German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said in a statement posted to his X account Saturday.
What are some key facts about Solingen?
Solingen, home to more than 150,000 people, is just east of Düsseldorf, the capital of Germany’s most populous state, North Rhine-Westphalia.
Known around the world for the production of high-end knives and scissors, Solingen calls itself the “city of blades.” The attack happened in the busy square at the heart of the festival celebrating the 650th anniversary of the first written mention of the city.
Solingen is a diverse city that has benefited from foreign workers since the guest-worker programs of the 1960s brought foreign workers to the city’s many blade manufacturers. More than 20% of the city’s residents are not German citizens, and thousands more hold dual citizenship.
The city was the site of one of the most traumatizing racist attacks in postwar Germany, in 1993, when a group of young neo-Nazis set fire to a house inhabited by a Turkish family. Five people were killed, including three children, and 17 people were injured.