DUESSELDORF, Germany (Reuters) -A German courtroom discovered Syrian citizen Issa Al Hasan responsible of an Islamic State-inspired 2024 stabbing assault on a pageant within the western metropolis of Solingen wherein three individuals had been killed and 10 others injured, sentencing him to life imprisonment.
The assault upended the election marketing campaign heading as much as this 12 months’s nationwide election, boosting the far-right Various for Germany and contributing to now-Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s resolution to double down on migration controls as a spotlight of his marketing campaign.
Born in Syria in 1998, Al Hasan had focused the pageant, commemorating the 650th anniversary of Solingen’s founding, within the perception that “unbelievers” could be discovered there, prosecutors stated.
Earlier than the assault on August 23, 2024, he had been in contact with an IS handler through the Telegram messaging platform, recording a video saying his allegiance.
Al Hasan entered the group and stabbed wildly round himself within the crowd, aiming for bystanders’ throats and higher our bodies, in accordance with investigators.
He instructed a court-appointed adviser that he himself needed to flee IS in 2013, through the Syrian civil warfare. One in all lots of of 1000’s displaced by the battle, he got here to Germany in 2022.
Al Hasan, who confessed to authorities on his arrest, appeared contrite in the beginning of the trial in Might, staring dejectedly at his desk and telling the courtroom he “bore a heavy burden of guilt”.
Later, he adopted a extra defiant perspective, saying his assault was justified by Germany’s gross sales of weapons for Israel’s invasion of Gaza and that he couldn’t bear seeing individuals in Germany dance whereas Palestinian youngsters had been killed.
“I simply wish to go to jail and speak about it not,” he instructed a decide throughout his trial, native public broadcaster WDR reported.
(Reporting by Tom Kaeckenhoff in Duesseldorf and Thomas Escritt in Berlin, modifying by Thomas Seythal)