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Knife Attacker Kills One at German Train Station | ASHARQ AL-AWSAT English Archive 2005 -2017
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A German policeman patrols the main train station in Munich. Reuters


A young German man was arrested after several people were stabbed at a train station near Munich early Tuesday, authorities said.

A 50-year-old man died in a hospital and three other men aged 43, 55 and 58 were wounded.

Police quoted witnesses as saying the assailant made “politically motivated comments” during the assault.

The 27-year-old suspect, a German who wasn’t resident in Bavaria, attacked several people with a 10-centimeter (four-inch) knife at the Grafing Bahnhof station, police said.

The attack happened shortly before 5 a.m. (0300 GMT) at the station, which is some 30 kilometers (nearly 20 miles) east of Munich and near the end of one of the city’s commuter railway lines.

At the scene, forensic experts marked more than 40 bloody footprints — some of them barefoot — on the train platform with chalk numbers and collected evidence, including a cellphone that was pulled from the gap between the train and platform.

“We can say very little at the moment about the background” to the attack, said Karl-Heinz Segerer, a spokesman for Bavaria’s state criminal police office.

“Witness questioning shows that there were politically motivated comments on the perpetrator’s part” during the attack, Segerer told n-tv television. He didn’t give details.

But witnesses said the assailant, a 27-year-old man, shouted “Allahu Akbar.”

Bavaria’s top security official, Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann, said officials also will look into whether the assailant was mentally disturbed.

Germany, which is playing a supporting role in the fight against ISIS, has not suffered a major attack by militants on the scale of those that have hit France and Belgium.

But ministers have repeatedly warned an assault is possible and German security services are on alert.

Over 800 home-grown radicals have left the country to join fighters in Syria and Iraq and about 260 have returned.

Germany has also been a transit country for militants who carried out attacks in Belgium this year and Paris last year. There are concerns that some of the more than 1 million migrants who arrived in the country last year have slipped off officials’ radar.