BERLIN: German chancellor Olaf Scholz condemned a deadly knife attack Wednesday as “an unbelievable act of terror” and demanded to know why the Afghan suspect had been able to stay in the country.
Bavaria state interior minister Joachim Herrmann said the suspect had come to the attention of authorities for violent behaviour on three separate occasions.
“The authorities must explain as quickly as possible why the attacker was even still in Germany,” Scholz said in a statement reacting to the killing of a man and a child in Aschaffenburg.
The unnamed suspect had entered Germany in 2022 and unsuccessfully sought asylum and was meant to have left late last year, Herrmann told a press conference.
Scholz, who faces elections a month from now, called the attack “an unbelievable act of terror” and offered his sympathies to the victims’ families and two more people injured.
“But that is not enough: I am sick of seeing such acts of violence occurring in our country every few weeks, by perpetrators who have actually come here to find protection here,” he added.
He said that “a false notion of tolerance is completely inappropriate here”.
Once authorities had worked out how the man had been allowed to remain in Germany, “consequences must follow immediately from the findings, words are not enough,” he said.