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A Syrian man has been sentenced to life imprisonment for a 2024 stabbing attack in western Germany in which three people were killed and 10 others injured.
Issa al-Hasan, 27, who arrived in Germany as a refugee after travelling through Turkey and the Balkans in 2022 and had been a member of the Islamic State militant group, had acted out of “treacherous and base motives”, the court in Düsseldorf said.
The stabbings, which took place during a festival to mark the 650th anniversary of Solingen, significantly influenced Germany’s election campaign, enhancing support for the far-right Alternative für Deutschland and encouraging the then-opposition leader, now chancellor, Friedrich Merz, to focus his campaign on a defiant pledge to intensify migration controls.
Al-Hasan, who had applied for asylum on the basis that he wanted to avoid military conscription in Syria, had carried out his attack on the festival knowing that he would find “unbelievers” in the crowds, prosecutors said, adding he had wanted to contribute to a “holy war”.
Prior to the attack on 23 August 2024, he had had contact with an Islamic State handler on the Telegram messaging platform, and had recorded a video announcing his allegiance to the group in which he had wielded a meat cleaver and stated in Arabic: “By God, I will dismember you.”
Investigators told the court how al-Hasan had entered a crowd of people and started stabbing seemingly randomly around him, specifically targeting people’s throats and upper bodies with a 15cm-long knife.
Among the eye witnesses to give evidence during the four-month trial, was a 58-year-old man, identified only as Michael W, who told the court how his wife, Ines W, a 56-year-old pharmacist, had bled to death in his arms after being stabbed.
“Suddenly I saw that my wife was no longer dancing,” he said. “She sat on the floor, couldn’t talk and pointed to her neck. Then she pulled her collar away and blood spurted out of a wound, in a throbbing way, because her carotid artery had been lacerated.”
Emergency workers were unable to save her. She died along with two men aged 56 and 67. Michael W was also seriously injured in the attack.
Eye witnesses reported that al-Hasan had shouted “Allahu Akbar” during the assault.
At the start of his trial in May, he had stated his remorse for the attack, telling judge Winfried van der Grinten “I deserve and expect a life sentence” and that he “bore a heavy burden of guilt”.
Subsequently he took on a more confrontational stance and said his attack was justified on the grounds of Germany’s sales of weapons for Israel’s invasion of Gaza. He stated he had been unable to watch Germans dance while Palestinian children were being killed.
Van der Grinten said that al-Hasan had acted “on the basis of his radical Islamic beliefs”. The court imposed the order of preventive detention on al-Hasan. While a sentence of life imprisonment in Germany normally means that a convicted person is released after a maximum of 15 years, al-Hasan will probably never leave prison.
