Berliner Tageblatt - Afghan man gets life in prison for jihadist knife killing in Germany

The 26-year-old, only partially named as Sulaiman A. and found to be a supporter of the Islamic State group, committed the knife attack in May 2024 in the western city of Mannheim.

The court convicted him of murder, attempted murder and dangerous bodily harm and judged his crimes to be especially grave, which virtually rules out early release.

Sulaiman A. used a large hunting knife in the attack which targeted a rally by Pax Europa, a group that campaigns against radical Islam.

He initially attacked a speaker and other demonstrators, then stabbed a police officer who rushed in to help before being shot and wounded by police himself.

The critically wounded police officer, 29-year-old Rouven L., died two days later of his injuries.

Many Germans were especially shocked as a video of the attack circulating online showed the officer being repeatedly stabbed in the back of the head.

- 'Greatest possible harm' -

Presiding Judge Herbert Anderer said that the attacker wanted to cause "the greatest possible harm in the form of as many deaths as possible".

He also wanted to kill police officers as representatives of the German state and planned to die a "martyr's death" and "to enter paradise", the judge said.

Sulaiman A. arrived in Germany in 2013 aged just 14, together with his brother but without their parents.

They were denied asylum but, as unaccompanied minors, granted stays of deportation and permanent residency, and initially placed in care facilities, media reports said.

During the trial, the defendant confessed to the crime and, in his final statement, apologised to the relatives of the slain police officer.

He claimed to have been manipulated through social media and radicalised following Israel's war in Gaza sparked by the October 2023 attack by the Palestinian militant group Hamas.

The judge turned to the police officer's family and told them: "Your son stood for the rule of law -- as horrible as it is, he died for it."

- String of attacks -

The stabbing was one of several bloody attacks that have inflamed a heated debate about the influx of several million refugees and migrants to Germany over the past decade.

Fears about immigration and public safety have fuelled the rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) which won its best-ever result of over 20 percent in February's general election.

The election winners, the conservative CDU/CSU alliance of Chancellor Friedrich Merz, have made a tougher migration policy one of their top priorities.

Merz's government has tightened border controls and announced plans to regularly deport criminals to countries of origin previously considered unsafe, including Taliban-run Afghanistan.

Last week, a Syrian man was sentenced to life in prison for another high-profile Islamist knife attack, which left three people dead in the western city of Solingen last year.

Last month, an Afghan man identified only as Farhad N. was charged over a car-ramming attack in February in Munich that killed a two-year-old girl and her mother, with prosecutors saying he also acted out of Islamist motivations.

The deadliest recent attack occurred in Magdeburg in December, when a rented SUV driven at high speed into a crowded Christmas market killed six people and injured hundreds more.

A Saudi psychiatrist, Taleb Jawad al-Abdulmohsen, faces six charges of murder and 338 charges of attempted murder in the attack, which authorities believe was committed with a more complex motive.

In January, then interior minister Nancy Faeser described Abdulmohsen as "massively Islamophobic and close to right-wing extremist ideologies" and influenced by "incoherent conspiracy theories".

L.Dubois--BTB