According to the Bild newspaper citing witnesses, the attacker shouted "Allahu Akbar." The attacker's motive so far has been unclear. A representative of the police press service told Sputnik that it is unclear whether the incident is a terror attack.
"The attacker was known to the security agencies as an Islamist, but not as a jihadist," Andy Grote, Hamburg's federal state interior minister, said at a press conference on Saturday, adding that there were indications that the man could have religious, Islamist motives for the attack but at the same time the man had psychological issues.
The man, born in the United Arab Emirates, was a failed asylum seeker and was targeted for deportation, but since he had no identity documents his case had been put off. He stabbed a 50-year-old German man to death at an Edeka supermarket and injured six others.
Later on Friday, German police conducted a security operation at a shelter on Hamburg’s northern outskirts linked to the failed asylum seeker who stabbed a person to death in Hamburg.
The supermarket incident is another instance in a series of Islamist knife, ax and truck attacks in Germany that have left dozens of people dead or wounded since last year.
