An Afghan man was sentenced to life in prison on Tuesday for a jihadist stabbing spree in Germany last year that killed a police officer and left five people wounded.<\/p>\n
The 26-year-old, only partially named as Sulaiman A. and found to be an adherent of the Islamic State group, committed the knife attack in May 2024 in the western city of Mannheim.<\/p>\n
The court convicted him of murder and five counts of attempted murder and dangerous bodily harm, and judged his crimes to be especially grave, which virtually rules out early release.<\/p>\n
Sulaiman A. used a large hunting knife in the attack which targeted a rally by Pax Europa, a group that campaigns against radical Islam.<\/p>\n
He initially attacked a speaker and other demonstrators, then stabbed a police officer who rushed in to help.\u00a0The officer, named as 29-year-old Rouven L., died two days later.<\/p>\n
Many Germans were especially shocked as a video of the attack circulating online showed the police officer being repeatedly stabbed in the back of the head.<\/p>\n
According to German media reports, Sulaiman A. arrived in Germany in 2013 aged just 14, together with his brother but without their parents.<\/p>\n
They were denied asylum but, as unaccompanied minors, granted stays of deportation and permanent residency, and initially placed in care facilities, reports have said.<\/p>\n
During the trial, he confessed to the crime and, in his final statement, apologised to the relatives of the slain police officer.<\/p>\n
He claimed to have been manipulated through social media chats and radicalised following Israel’s war in Gaza sparked by the October 2023 attack by the Palestinian militant group Hamas.<\/p>\n
– String of attacks –<\/p>\n
The stabbing was one of several bloody attacks that have inflamed a heated debate about the influx of several million refugees and migrants to Germany over the past decade.<\/p>\n
Fears about immigration and public safety have fuelled the rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) which won its best-ever result of over 20 percent in February’s general election.<\/p>\n
The election winners, the conservative CDU\/CSU alliance of Chancellor Friedrich Merz, have made a tougher migration policy one of their top priorities.<\/p>\n
Merz’s government has tightened border controls and announced plans to regularly deport criminals to countries of origin previously considered unsafe, including Taliban-run Afghanistan.<\/p>\n
Last week, a Syrian man was sentenced to life in prison for another high-profile Islamist knife attack, which left three people dead in the western city of Solingen last year.<\/p>\n
Last month, an Afghan man identified only as Farhad N. was charged over a car-ramming attack in February in Munich that killed a two-year-old girl and her mother, with prosecutors saying he also acted out of Islamist motivations.<\/p>\n
The deadliest recent attack occurred in Magdeburg in eastern Germany in December, when a rented SUV driven at high speed into a crowded Christmas market killed six people and injured hundreds more.<\/p>\n
A Saudi psychiatrist, Taleb Jawad al-Abdulmohsen, faces six charges of murder and 338 charges of attempted murder in the attack, which authorities believe was committed with a more complex motive.<\/p>\n
In January, then interior minister Nancy Faeser described Abdulmohsen as “massively Islamophobic and close to right-wing extremist ideologies” and influenced by “incoherent conspiracy theories”.<\/p>\n
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