In the German city of Soest, a Syrian migrant is accused of stabbing a snack bar employee in the neck inside the Penny supermarket chain, causing life-threatening injuries that nearly severed a vital artery.
Police say that the suspect had already been banned from the supermarket chain, and when he entered the premises at 5:15 p.m. on Tuesday, a 42-year-old employee attempted to stop him.
“Since the accused did not want to leave the snack bar, a scuffle broke out,” said police spokesman Marco Baffa-Scinelli, according to German newspaper Soester Anzeige.
The suspect, who lives in a nearby accommodation for migrants, pulled out a knife and stabbed the victim “abruptly in the neck,” according to the police report. The knife nearly hit the victim’s neck artery, creating a gaping wound that spouted blood across the supermarket.
The attacker fled the scene, but once police arrived, he reappeared, at which point he was arrested.
Police were unable to interrogate the suspect due to a “language barrier.” The weapon involved in the attack has not yet been recovered.
The police, in their press release, did not publish the nationality or asylum status of the Syrian, instead simply stating that a Soester, which is the name given to local residents of the city, stabbed another local. Junge Freiheit newspaper accused the police of obscuring the attacker’s identity.
The Alternative for Germany protested in the city in July, holding a rally against what it described as “criminal protection seekers.” The party wrote that”when we went to the train station afterward, a group of people seeking asylum shouted wild insults and rioted in the square, underlining the actual urgent need (to deport them).”
Soest has been of particular concern for the AfD, with the party writing that it has taken in a huge share of migrants disproportionate to its population size.
“North Rhine-Westphalia municipalities are handling more immigrants than they should under the Refugee Admission Act. Soest has a ‘fulfillment rate’ of 183 percent!” the party’s faction in North Rhine-Westphalia wrote on X, which according to the party, is the highest rate in the entire German state.
Although knife attacks are now commonplace across Germany, with approximately 50 occurring every day, police and media outlets routinely obscure the nationality of attackers, which also applies to a wide variety of other serious crimes, including gang rape.
For example, the Soester Anzeiger and many other German publications made no mention of the attacker’s Syrian nationality.
Just last month, police were accused of failing to inform the public about a gang rape involving migrant men in Görlitzer Park for over a month. Last year, when an Iraqi brutally stabbed a German at a train station in Berlin, papers refused to publish the suspect’s nationality. In 2020, after an African male sexually assaulted a German teenager, police used a “symbolic photo” depicting a White male sexually assaulting a female.
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The general exception to hiding the nationality of suspects is when a high-profile attack occurs or if there are murder victims. During the mass sexual assaults in Cologne during New Year’s Eve 2015/2016, in which over 2,000 German women were sexually assaulted, the German press was accused of hiding the fact that hundreds of North African and Middle Eastern refugees were responsible. The information only came to light days later, as there were fears over the political fallout, which indeed came swiftly and helped fuel the rise of the AfD.
Stabbing attacks involving migrants are commonplace. In fact, here is a list of just a few of the stabbings from 2021 alone involving migrants: An Afghan stabbed three people at a Dresden train while screaming “Allahu Akbar;” a Somali man stabbed and killed three women in the German city of Würzburg; a Somali man stabbed his victim 111 times and beheaded him in Bavaria; a Syrian migrant stabbed four people on a high-speed ICE train between Regensburg and Nuremberg; and an Afghan refugee stabbed a woman who was working in a park because “she was working,” which made him angry.
