Knife murder in Dresden was Islamic terror attack – Syrian jihadist arrested

The German mainstream media currently revolves around the Minister of Health Jens Spahn and the Coronavirus and German daily Die Welt reported the terrorist murder in the back pages under “Miscellaneous”.

At the beginning of October, two German tourists from North Rhine-Westphalia were suddenly and randomly attacked from behind with a knife in Dresden’s old town behind the Palace of Culture.

L’islamiste syrien arrêté pour le meurtre au poignard d'un Allemand à Dresde est arrivé en Allemagne en 2015. Il a déjà été condamné à deux reprises, pour coups et blessures et pour soutien à une entreprise terroriste https://t.co/2RULBtGUVE

— Luc de Barochez (@lucdebarochez) October 21, 2020

A 55-year-old man from Krefeld died in the intensive care unit, a 53-year-old man from Cologne survived the attack, seriously injured. The killer left the murder weapon, a kitchen knife, behind at the crime scene. Experts from the State Criminal Police Office of Saxony found DNA traces on it, which led to a hit in the police database.

The Dresden police have arrested a Syrian jihadist. The perpetrator, the 20-year-old Abdullah AHH has a “significant criminal record” and a “convicted ISIS supporter known to the police”, as it turned out on Wednesday afternoon.

The man has been radicalized since his arrival in Germany, in 2015, at the height of the influx of migrants from Syria. Several German media outlets have described him as a supporter of the jihadist organization.

He had been released from prison on September 29, only five days before the fatal attack on Dresden, and remained listed by the police as potentially “dangerous”. In Germany, the young man did not have official refugee status but remained “tolerated” by the authorities.

The investigations were entrusted to the Karlsruhe public prosecutor’s office, responsible for terrorism. Justice suspects “an act on Islamic grounds”, said the prosecutor’s office in Dresden in a statement.

Dresden police had formed a special commission (29 officers) after the attack. According to the prosecution, the suspect has already been the subject of several convictions for acts of violence and for having acted in order to recruit support for “a terrorist organization”.

In 2018, an expert opinion for German criminal investigators at the time of the suspect’s trial stated that “the accused had been advocating a jihadist ideology since early summer 2017, increasingly turning to ISIS and finally, as its supporter, thought about carrying out an assassination attempt”.

Abdullah AHH comes from near Aleppo and “fled” to Germany in the summer of 2015 via a large number of third countries. He was arrested in late August 2017. In December, he was sentenced to two youth sentences for assaulting law enforcement officers.

He is being charged with murder, attempted murder and dangerous physical harm. The motive for the act is “still unclear”. The attacker did not steal any valuables from his victims, thus ruling out a robbery offense.