Wuerzburg Attacks Leave Three People Dead, Multiple Injured

Three people have died and multiple more are injured after a stabbing attack took place in Wuerzburg, Germany on Friday. Police apprehended the suspect, a 24-year old Somali immigrant, who was shot but not killed by the police leading up to his arrest.

The man reportedly came to Germany in 2015 after it had begun to accept migrants and refugees from other parts of the world. The police fired a bullet into his thigh to prevent him from harming more victims, and he is currently recovering from his wounds and expected to make a full recovery. Police are questioning him while he is in the hospital.

Germany does not release the names of suspects in criminal cases. The regional Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann noted that the suspect had recently been hospitalized for mental health issues, stating that “His condition had been noticed in recent months, including violent tendencies, and a few days ago he was put into compulsory psychiatric treatment.”

Wuerzburg attacks are the most recent in a history of incidents

Although there are three confirmed fatalities–two of which were a young child and his parent–there are also five victims who are facing critical injuries. Minister Hermann said that “With the most seriously injured we are not sure they will survive.”

The stabbings occurred at city square known as Barbarossaplatz. They are the most recent in a series of alarming attacks that have taken place across Germany. Another stabbing took place in October of 2020 involving a Syrian national whose asylum had been rejected, the 20-year-old Abdullah al-H. H. stabbed two men in their 50’s in the city of Dresden, one survived but the other succumbed to his injuries.

The deadliest of these attacks took place on December of 2016, when a lorry was intentionally driven into a Christmas market, killing 12 people and injuring 56 others. The attacker was a Tunisian man, Anis Amri, who had failed to obtain asylum in Germany. ISIL, or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, had given Amri instructions on how to execute the attack. He hijacked a Polish delivery truck that had been making its way across Europe, killing its driver, Łukasz Robert Urban, and driving the truck into the Christmas market at Breitscheidplatz in Berlin.

In July of 2016 an 18-year-old German-Iranian man opened fire in a crowded shopping mall in Munich, killing nine people in an incident that caused a major security scare and brought life to a standstill for residents of Germany’s third largest city.

The teenager committed suicide, shooting himself in the head in the midst of the havoc he caused, Munich Police Chief Hubertus Andrae said early Saturday. There was no word on what triggered the young man’s attack, and Andrae said it was premature to judge whether the multiple shootings were a terrorist attack.

The Munich shooting rampage killed nine people, plus the gunman, and wounded 16 others, three critically. Children were among the wounded.