Farhad Noori, rejected asylum seeker in Germany, runs down 28 people at a trade union demonstration in Munich

Today at 10:30am near Stiglmaierplatz in Munich – not far from my old apartment – a 26 year-old asylum seeker in Germany named Farhad Noori¹ drove his Mini Cooper into the rear of a Verdi trade union demonstration. He evaded the marchers’ police escort and ran down 28 people, before officers opened fire and managed to subdue him. Two of Noori’s victims, a mother and her young son, ended up under his car. The young boy had to be resuscitated on-scene by emergency responders and it is uncertain whether he will live.

This was the second automobile attack on innocent bystanders in public since Magdgeburg in December, when the Saudi migrant Taleb al-Abdulmohsen drove a rented BMW into a Christmas market crowd, killing 6 and injuring 299. To this terrible tally comes the knife attacks in Mannheim, Solingen and Aschaffenburg. This singular and exceedingly rare category of crime – which has become a symbol for the decay in domestic security associated with mass migration – presently claims a nine-month toll in Germany of 12 dead and 343 wounded. The latest attack is additionally poignant, because it follows the Green and Social Democrat blockade of a bill to restrict migration in the Bundestag on 31 January. Among other things, the left parties withheld their votes because Alternative für Deutschland supported the legislation.

Noori fits what is by now a well-established pattern: He is a native Afghan who came to Germany in 2016 with the rest of the Merkel wave; he was known to the police for theft and drug offences; after the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees rejected his asylum application, he received a visa of tolerated stay anyway.

Like al-Abdulmohsen, the Christmas market attacker, Noori also had a large social media presence, with 68,000 followers on Instagram and another 33,000 on TikTok. On Instagram one finds pictures he posted last year of himself standing next to the Mini Cooper used in today’s attack:

Noori was primarily a competitive bodybuilder, but he was also a pious Muslim; Der Spiegel notes that some of his final social media posts contain “Islamist content,” which seems to be a reference to TikTok posts like this one. In apparent video of his arrest this morning, Noori can be heard shouting “God is great” over and over:

What will happen now is the very same thing that happened after all of these other attacks. Politicians will tell us that these events are unacceptable and that Germany must enact grave changes to prevent them in future. Then there will be renewed marches to celebrate diversity and oppose “the right,” because the most important victims of migrants attackers are of course all the peaceful Muslims they did not attack. Around this time we will be warned against over-generalising and overreacting, and then the story will slip from the headlines until the next time.

UPDATE: Some additional details have come to light. Noori’s asylum application was rejected in 2017, a year after his arrival. He became an illegal resident in 2020, but received his visa of toleration sometime thereafter. Some of his (now-deleted) Instagram posts show that he worked as store security for Ralph Lauren in Munich. He was known to the authorities for document forgery, among other crimes.

1. All media are presently withholding Noori’s family name, but your intrepid blogger discovered it – and his social media accounts – through his own researches. In this way I can offer you a modest second-order ‘exclusive.’ Believe me, I take no pleasure in this.