A Police officer investigates the scene of a stabbing. (AP/Matthias Schrader)
A young German man was arrested after several people were stabbed at a train station near Munich early Tuesday, authorities said. One victim later died in a hospital and three other people were wounded.
Police quoted witnesses as saying the assailant made “politically motivated comments” during the assault. Eyewitnesses said he shouted “Allah Akbar” [“God is great” in Arabic] during the attack, a phrase frequently shouted by Muslim terrorists during attacks.
“The assailant made remarks at the scene of the crime that indicate a political motivation — apparently an Islamist motive,” said a prosecutor’s spokesman. “We are still determining what the exact remarks were.”
The 27-year-old suspect, a German who is not a resident of 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. 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, police forensic experts in white coveralls 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 and said witnesses and the suspect will be pressed on what he said and to whom.
Bavaria’s top security official, Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann, said officials also will look into whether the assailant was mentally disturbed.
Police and prosecutors said a 50-year-old man died from his injuries. The other victims were men aged 43, 55 and 58. Their names weren’t released.
The mayor of the small Bavarian town where four people were stabbed says local people are deeply shaken by the crime.
Grafing Mayor Angelika Obermayr said that “something like this is absolutely new and shakes people deeply — otherwise, they only know this kind of thing from television.”
She added: “That it could happen here is absolutely stupefying.” She described Grafing as “an absolutely peaceful little Bavarian town.”
By: AP and United with Israel Staff
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