The perpetrator who killed three and injured eight in a mass stabbing on Friday evening at a music festival in Solingern, Germany has turned himself in, it was reported on Sunday.
Authorities have since identified him as a 26-year-old Syrian refugee.
“The suspect turned himself in and admitted to the crime,” Duesseldorf police and prosecutors said in a joint statement.
Solingen anniversary festival ends in tragedy
The mass stabbing took place at a local festival celebrating 650 years of the German city of Solingen and its cultural diversity. An assailant turned against members of the crowd and stabbed them in the neck at Fronhof, a marketplace in the center of the city, in front of one of the festival stages set up for live music.
The man then fled the scene and remained at large for almost 24 hours while the city was placed on lockdown as police searched for the perpetrator.
In the meantime, ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack and branded the hiding assailant as “a soldier of the Islamic State,” but the claim was yet to be verified by authorities on Sunday.
The three victims who died at the scene were two men, aged 67 and 56, and a 56-year-old woman. Eight other persons were injured in the mass stabbing, four of them critically.
Stabbing assailant hiding in yard during manhunt
The suspect was reportedly still covered in blood from the attack when he approached police officers at around 9 p.m. local time Saturday, telling them “I’m the one you’re looking for.”
He had allegedly been hiding in a yard while police forces looked for him. Another two arrests were made on Saturday in relation to the attack, and one refugee center was raided by police as the manhunt for the assailant continued.
On Sunday, the Minister of Interior of North Rhine-Westphalia, Herbert Reul, confirmed to German TV that the attacker of the stabbing rampage was finally in police custody.
According to German news magazine Der Spiegel, the suspect had entered Germany in 2022 and applied for asylum in Bielefeld. He was supposed to have been deported to Bulgaria in the summer of 2023, but he went into hiding until his transfer order expired and was then granted protection in Germany.
The magazine reports that the suspect was not known to the authorities as an extremist.
Per Deutsche Welle, the German Federal Police have taken over the investigation, as they attempt to establish whether the suspect indeed had links to the Islamic State.
The suspect was due to appear before the Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe on Sunday.
