Three dead after knifeman goes on rampage in Bavarian city of Würzburg
At
least three people were killed and several more injured in an apparent spree of
stabbings in the Bavarian city of Würzburg.
A
24 year-old man from Somalia was said to have run amok with a knife in the city
centre before he was shot in the leg and arrested by police.
The
background and motive of yesterday’s attacks were unclear. A police spokeswoman
said only that a man had been detained and the situation was “under control”.
Parts of the city were sealed off.
Joachim
Herrmann, Bavaria’s interior minister, said the man had previously been
forcibly admitted for psychiatric treatment. Bild newspaper reported that he
was known to police.
Police
tweeted: “We have arrested a suspect. At present there are no signs of a second
perpetrator. There is no danger for the general public. Please refrain from
speculation.” The attack is thought to have begun at about 5pm in
Barbarossaplatz, a pedestrian zone in the heart of the medieval city.
One
video on social media after the incident showed a barefoot man wearing a
facemask and armed with a knife about 10in long walking through the square
before he was confronted by several passers-by with impromptu weapons including
a broom and a chair. One observer could be heard to say: “He’s just stabbed a
woman.”
Another
clip seemed to show the same man sparring with three other men who had
surrounded him in an apparent attempt to stop him.
Markus
Söder, chief minister of Bavaria, tweeted: “Appalling and shocking news from
Würzburg. We grieve with the victims and their families.”
Würzburg,
a city of 127,000 people on the banks of the River Main, is the administrative
capital of the Lower Franconia region in northern Bavaria.
Five years ago it was the scene of one of the first
suspected Islamist attacks on German soil, when Riaz Khan Ahmadzai, a
17-year-old refugee from Afghanistan, wounded four tourists from Hong Kong on a
train with an axe before stabbing a local woman in Heidingsfeld, a southern
suburb of the city. He was shot dead by police commandos.
Islamic
State later claimed responsibility for the attack and leaked internet chat logs
obtained by German prosecutors suggested that it had been co-ordinated by a
local member of the jihadist group.