Diverse man interrupts "Festival of Diversity" in Solingen by stabbing eleven people, killing three

This weekend, the city of Solingen in Nordrhein-Westfalen was slated to celebrate its 650th anniversary. Like the good Germans that they doubtless are, the Solinger proclaimed the occasion a “Festival of Diversity.” Municipal organisers had scheduled the bulk of their multicultural celebrations for today, with a separate “cultural and environmental” sub-festival bearing the theme “Life Needs Diversity.”

Alas, it never came to that. The diversity which life requires intervened:

Last night, at 9:37pm, after the opening of the festivities, an as-yet unidentified attacker of “Arab” or “southern” appearance knifed eleven people in an apparently planned attack. Witnesses say that he stabbed deliberately at the necks of his victims. He left three dead and another five seriously injured, before fleeing amid the chaos.

This video shows the aftermath:

Special operations police (the SEK) raided an apartment early this morning and arrested a 17 year-old in Solingen, but investigators soon cleared him of suspicion. Later on police arrested a 15 year-old suspect in Düsseldorf; he is presently charged with “failing to report planned offences in connection with the attack.” Spiegel reports that the arrestee is a Kyrgyzstani refugee:

He was living in refugee centre. According to SPIEGEL information, he may have had a conversation at the Solingen festival with the alleged suspect, who is on the run. Witnesses claim to have heard the arrested man and the other man talking about a possible knife attack. The 15-year-old is therefore accused of failing to report a planned offence. According to SPIEGEL information, he refuses to make any statements.

Chief public prosecutor Markus Caspers said at a press conference at the Wuppertal police station: “According to witness statements, a previously unknown person is said to have spoken to the teenager shortly before the attack about intentions that would fit the execution of the offence.” According to the investigators, they do not yet know whether this person is the perpetrator. Two witnesses heard the conversation but did not witness the offence themselves. They have therefore contacted the police.

Police say that they cannot rule out a “terrorist-motivated offence.”

Our state media Diversity Explainers are hard at work with preemptive attempts to confuse our pattern recognition modules. Asked if anything was known about the victim, a ZDF reporter responded that “There are witnesses statements saying it was an Arab-looking man, whatever that’s supposed to mean.” Indeed it is very mysterious, what Arab people look like, and surely hard to know why any such Arab-looking person might be stabbing people at a municipal festival. His counterpart at tagesschau, reporting from the crime scene, remarked that we know as yet very little about the perpetrator’s motives and that there are many possibilities. “Was this an attack that was carried out, for example, on behalf of Islamist terror? Or was this an attack that was carried out, for example, because the attacker was against foreigners?” Two equally probable possibilities, I’m sure you’ll agree.

At an autumn fair in nearby Wermelskirchen, authorities have responded to news of the Solingen attacks by forbidding merchants at their fair from selling knives. That makes total sense. Obviously what is killing people is not the imported and to-be-celebrated diversity from the global south, but rather these sharp objects that for some reason never gave us any problems before. If only there were a knife prohibition in Solingen, I’m sure stabbings never would’ve happened. This is just like how the newly established “weapons prohibition zone” in the Frankfurt Main Station prevented that dramatic shooting death there last Wednesday.

Before wading into the reaction of our wise and farsighted politicians, I asked Grok, the Twitter AI chatbot, to compose an insincere Tweet expressing sympathy for the victims of a knife attack.

Grok’s effort compares very well with the statements I found. “The attack in Solingen is a terrible event that I find very upsetting,” Chancellor Olaf Scholz tweeted this morning. “An attacker brutally killed several people … We mourn the victims and stand by their families.” Mario Voigt, head of the Thüringen CDU, offered similar words: “The terrible news of the terrorist attack in Solingen has left people … standing together in grief and sympathy… I mourn with the families and loved ones of the victims who were senselessly torn from their lives.” Ricarda Lang, co-head of the Green Party, likewise deplored the “Horrific news from Solingen, where people just wanted to celebrate and were brutally murdered. My thoughts and sympathy are with the victims and their families …” Nor could German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser deprive herself of the chance to repeat the bland and the oversaid at least one more time: “We are deeply shocked by the brutal attack … We mourn for the people who were taken from life in a terrible way. My thoughts are with the families of those killed and those seriously injured.”

I could compile dozens more such statements, but that is enough. You can just see the empty eyes and the slack jaws of the people who sent out these Tweets – the people who helped fill Germany with untold thousands of violent and young foreigners, and who now have no solution whatsoever to the deep problems they have sown. When I was younger, I reacted with autistic impatience to news of terror attacks and stabbings like these; I reasoned that, statistically, they were not a significant cause of death and should be ignored. That was entirely wrong of me. These are assaults on individuals and for that reason tragic, but even more than that they are attacks on our entire civil society; they undermine that which no statistic can capture, namely our sense of security and order. Our rulers no longer consider it their responsibility to maintain such things. Instead they offer shallow, childish praise to a nebulous Diversity that is supposed to make everything better, more liberal, more pacified, more open and more compassionate, but that in fact only ever achieves the opposite of these things.

They have no ideas, no future vision, no plan, and no goal. They are at the end; like zombie helmsmen, they steer the ship of state expressionless into the reefs, deaf to all warnings.

UPDATE: Somebody has leaked an internal police report to Welt am Sonntag. The report contains this statement: “A witness who was injured in the attack stated that the unknown suspect was ‘familiar from Solingen’ and that he was also a visitor at a local mosque. One witness reported that the suspect shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’ during the attack.”

UPDATE 2: The Amaq News Agency of the Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the Solingen stabbings. They say they their “soldier” conducted the attack on a “gathering of Christians” in Solingen as revenge for Muslim victims in Palestine. Anything is possible but I would be sceptical of this report; IS can claim responsibility for anything that’s in the news, and it’s somewhat amusing that their press office thinks the Solingen Diversity Festival was a Christian event.

Otherwise, police are raiding the local asylum centre. Things are looking bad for the state media speculation that this attack might well have been the work of some right-winger who hates “foreigners.”

UPDATE 3: As Bild reports, the attacker has turned himself into police, a day and two hours after his assault at the Solingen Diversity Festival. He had been hiding in a yard all that time and apparently gave up. He name is Issa al Hassan; he is a 26 year-old Sunni Muslim and a Syrian asylum seeker who came to Germany in 2022. He was granted residence under “subsidiary protection” provisions, because his country is at war but he met neither the requirements for official refugee status nor for asylum.

Last night’s raid on the asylum centre, mentioned above, resulted in the arrest of a 36 year-old man and the seizure of evidence. NRW Interior Minister Herbert Reul told the press that this second suspect “was not the one we had in our sights from the beginning.” His relationship to the attack, if any, is unclear, but it is highly curious that the police now appear to have three men in custody.