German police and prosecutors have said the Afghan suspect in a car ramming in central Munich that injured at least 36 people is believed to have had an “Islamist” motive and will answer to charges of attempted murder.
One day after the attack on a trade union rally during the final stage of the German election campaign, the chief prosecutor Gabriele Tilmann told reporters that online “communications” by the suspect, a 24-year-old asylum seeker, pointed to Islamic extremism.
Investigators, however, had found no links so far to a jihadist organisation such as the Islamic State group nor any accomplices, she said.
“I’m very cautious about making rash judgments but based on everything we know now, I would say with confidence there was an Islamist motive for this act,” Tilmann said.
She noted the suspect had prayed as police detained him and called out “Allahu Akbar”, the Arabic phrase meaning God is great.
Tilmann said the alleged assailant had admitted during preliminary questioning conducted in German that he acted “deliberately”. It was not immediately clear why he had targeted a demonstration by public sector workers, who were on strike for higher pay.
The suspect, identified only as Farhad N, based on German media practice in criminal cases, is alleged to have driven his Mini Cooper around a police car guarding the union demonstration, accelerated and deliberately ploughed into the back of the 1,500-person crowd.
Police said at least 36 people were hurt, two of them critically, one of whom was reported to be a two-year-old child.
The shocking attack left a scene of carnage in Germany’s third largest city and stoked tensions around immigration and public safety as the country prepares to go to the polls on 23 February.
Germany has been rocked by a series of violent assaults in recent months, allegedly carried out by asylum seekers. They include a deadly car ramming at a Christmas market in Magdeburg blamed on a Saudi doctor with reported far-right sympathies.
The German president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the Bavarian capital for the Munich Security Conference, which gathers high-ranking officials from around the globe, laid a single white rose at the scene as snow fell. He expressed his shock.
“The brutality of this act devastates us and baffles us,” he said. “The perpetrator is in custody and will be brought to justice according to the rule of law.”
In a televised debate late on Thursday, the chancellor, Olaf Scholz, defended his record on border security against accusations of negligence from the conservative frontrunner, Friedrich Merz, and the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party.
“We will surely see him [the suspect] convicted in court and before he can leave prison he will be sent back to his home country,” Scholz said. He admitted that deportations to Afghanistan under the Taliban were “not easy” on legal grounds but said Germany was at present organising further expulsion flights to the war-ravaged country.
The AfD co-leader Alice Weidel told the same programme that her party’s hardline stance would keep out all new arrivals apart from “qualified people ready to enter the job market”. She asserted that the Munich suspect “would never have made it into the country under an AfD-led government”.
Germany’s mainstream parties have ruled out forming a coalition with the AfD on the grounds it is extremist, effectively barring it from power.
Farhad N arrived in Germany via Italy in December 2016. His application for asylum from Afghanistan was initially rejected in February 2017 but authorities later granted him temporary residence and work permits that were scheduled to expire in April.
The suspect, a hobby bodybuilder who worked in retail store security, has tens of thousands of followers on Instagram and TikTok, where he repeatedly posted pictures of himself shirtless and posing in front of luxury cars.
But investigators said they also found possibly Islamist messages on his mobile phone and said he wrote in a chat on Wednesday, one day before the attack: “Maybe tomorrow I’ll no longer be here.”
