It was supposed to be a cozy outing in the park – but ended in disaster.
On Wednesday, a group of preschool children in Aschaffenburg was attacked by a mentally ill man who stabbed two people to death, including a two-year-old. Three more people were seriously injured.
The senseless act of violence is the latest in a long series of attacks in Germany with perpetrators from Afghanistan and Syria. Last year, a police officer was killed when an Afghan attacked an Islam-critical meeting in Mannheim. Just months later, a Syrian with jihadist connections went on a knife rampage at a city festival in Solingen and killed three people.
Now, anger is growing among both the public and politicians, and with it, demands for action are increasing.
The authorities currently see no Islamist motive behind Wednesday's attack.
"Obvious mental illnesses"
For the time being, the suspicions point very strongly towards his obvious mental illnesses, says Bavaria's Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann.
The 28-year-old had only been in Germany for just over two years, but had already committed at least three violent crimes. As recently as August, he stabbed a Ukrainian woman near the asylum accommodation in nearby Alzenau where he lived. Despite this, and despite his asylum application being recently withdrawn after he himself initiated a return to his home country, he was on the loose.
Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz writes in an Instagram post that he is "tired" of this type of attack every other week and promises immediate consequences.
Demanding deportation
A month before the election, when the Social Democrat is generally expected to lose the chancellorship to the Christian Democrat Friedrich Merz, the act gives new relevance to the emotionally charged debate about how the state should handle criminal asylum seekers. "Deportation now!" demands the top candidate of the nationalist AfD, Alice Weidel, in a post on X.
And Merz, who last year demanded a complete stop to refugee reception from, among other places, Afghanistan and long-term imprisonment of convicted criminals who do not have the right to stay but cannot be deported, promises to fundamentally reform asylum legislation. If he gets to form a government after the election, it will immediately become a "de facto entry ban" for all without valid documents, says Merz.
Besides the two-year-old boy, a 41-year-old man was also killed, who was out for a walk and saw what happened. By intervening between the knife man and the children, he likely prevented an even greater bloodbath.
He saved their lives, says Joachim Herrmann.
