Ride amok on the Berlin city motorway
During the rampage on the Berlin city freeway on the evening of August 18, 2020 , a suspect drove a passenger car on federal freeway 100 and deliberately caused several collisions.
Investigations
Course of events
The suspect caused collisions with his car with two motorcycles , a scooter and a car. After the last collision, the vehicle could not continue its journey due to the wedging with a motorcycle at the Alboinstrasse motorway exit in the Tempelhof district , whereupon the driver got out and left on the road rolled out a prayer rug . When the police arrived , he threatened to detonate objects in a metal box he was carrying. The contents of the box later turned out to be harmless. Six people were injured in the act, three of them seriously.
Suspect
According to the police , the driver is the thirty-year-old Iraqi citizen Sarmad al-Z., Who was known to the police for crimes such as assault , but not in the area of state security. Al-Z. was born in Baghdad in 1990 . The refused asylum seeker, who lived in an asylum seekers' home in Vantaa in southern Finland in 2015 and who immigrated to Germany at the beginning of 2016 with a tolerance until December 2020, maintained contact with a radical Islamist threat in a refugee home in Treptow-Köpenick , where he lived until October 2019 . The Berlin Public Prosecutor's Office is investigating at least three cases of attempted murder and dangerous interference in road traffic . The extent to which he misled the authorities about his identity when entering Germany is also being determined.
An Islamist motivation is also suspected based on statements made after the crime and on the perpetrator's Facebook page . "According to current knowledge, it was an Islamist-motivated attack," said a spokesman for the Berlin public prosecutor. The Federal Public Prosecutor's Office responsible for terrorism has so far refused to take over the case.
A magistrate ruled on August 19, the provisional accommodation in the forensic unit of the prison hospital where he is being treated psychiatrically. During an initial examination, a police doctor did not assume that there was no culpability; A further medical examination revealed psychological abnormalities, despite which, according to the Berlin Public Prosecutor Margarete Kopper, targeted behavior was possible.
Reactions
Berlin's Governing Mayor Michael Müller ( SPD ) was dismayed by the act. According to Interior Senator Andreas Geisel (SPD), the perpetrator presented himself as “religiously charged, combined with possible psychological problems”. The CDU and the right-wing populist AfD criticized the “failure of the state government in the fight against extremists”. This, in turn, was criticized by the SPD because the suspect is not known to be an extremist and because of the nature of the offenses and the contact with a person threatening the rule of law, his deportation was not possible. The extremism expert of the RBB Jo Goll said that “the actions of the perpetrator did not appear as if he had had a well-planned plan for the crime. The police and the security authorities could probably not be accused of failing to monitor the man better. ”The chairman of the conference of interior ministers , the Thuringian interior minister Georg Maier (SPD) warned against underestimating Islamist terror and warned against the threat of extremism to continue to take seriously. The “devious attack” makes it clear that the “danger from religiously motivated terrorism should not be underestimated”. The early detection of radicalization is a challenge for the authorities. As a presumed Islamist-motivated attack, the act was also linked by conservative circles to German migration policy ; the newspaper Die Welt questioned why the perpetrator had received a Duldung .
The Berlin bishops Christian Stäblein and Heiner Koch condemned the "apparently deliberately caused accidents" and expressed their condolences to the victims. They also called for religion not to be misused as a reason for violence.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Suspect comes to psychiatry , on tagesschau.de
- ↑ Investigators suspect Islamist motive in A100 collisions. Retrieved August 19, 2020 .
- ^ Drivers in psychiatry after the Berlin autobahn attack. Retrieved August 19, 2020 .
- ^ Berlin motorcyclists 'targeted in terror attack' . In: BBC News . August 19, 2020 ( bbc.com [accessed August 19, 2020]).
- ↑ Berlin motorway crashes are a 'suspected Islamist act,' say prosecutors , cnn.com, accessed August 20, 2020
- ↑ tagesschau.de: Berliner Stadtautobahn: Investigators assume an Islamist attack. Retrieved August 19, 2020 .
- ↑ Public prosecutor speaks of "downright hunting for motorcyclists". Retrieved August 19, 2020 .
- ↑ Investigators suspect Islamist motive in A100 collisions. Retrieved August 19, 2020 .
- ↑ a b Authorities had attackers from Autobahn "not on the radar" , zeit.de, accessed August 20, 2020
- ↑ a b c d Sarmad A. - between fanaticism and mental disorder. Retrieved August 19, 2020 .
- ↑ a b c CDU and AfD criticize Senate after attack on A100 , rbb24.de, accessed August 20, 2020
- ↑ Highway stop: Does Sarmad A. really come from Iraq? , Morgenpost.de, August 22, 2020, accessed August 25, 2020
- ↑ a b man causes accidents on the city motorway in Berlin , on augsburger-allgemeine.de
- ↑ Berliner Zeitung: Islamist attack on A100: Iraqis go to psychiatry. Retrieved on August 19, 2020 (German).
- ↑ WELT: A100 Berlin: Man is “hunting motorcyclists” - suspects in psychiatry . In: THE WORLD . August 19, 2020 ( welt.de [accessed August 19, 2020]).
- ↑ SPD rejects criticism of the Senate after the attack on A100 . rbb24.de
- ↑ IMK chairman Maier warns against underestimating Islamist terror , deutschlandfunk.de, accessed August 21, 2020
- ↑ These weaknesses in migration policy made the attack in Berlin possible , Die Welt, August 25, 2020, accessed August 25, 2020
- ^ Bishops: Do not abuse religion as a reason for violence , berlin.de, accessed August 20, 2020