German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has vowed to strengthen weapons and deportation laws following a deadly mass stabbing in the western city of Solingen on Friday night.
A suspected Islamic extremist killed three people and injured eight others during a street festival that marked the city’s 650th anniversary. A 26-Syrian asylum-seeker reportedly turned himself over to the police, while admitting to the assault, NPR reported on Sunday citing German authorities.
The 26-year-old had his asylum application rejected and was supposed to be deported last year to Bulgaria, through which he had first entered the European Union. Germany’s failure to deport the Syrian man has renewed criticism of the German government’s handling of deportation and migration policies.
Scholz laid a white rose at a makeshift memorial in Solingen and said he was “furious and angry” about the attack.
“This was terrorism – terrorism against us all, threatening all our lives, our coexistence, our way of life,” Scholz told reporters. “That is also what the people who plan and carry out such attacks always intend and it is something we will never accept.”
The chancellor said that there had already been a 30% increase in deportations this year, but promised that the government would look at how they can “contribute to raising these figures even further.”
“We must do everything to ensure that such things never happen in our country, if possible,” Scholz said of the attack. He said that would include toughening knife laws in particular “and this should and will happen very quickly.”
Earlier this month, Interior Minister Nancy Faeser proposed regulations that would allow knives measuring up to 2.4 inches (6 centimeters) to be carried in public rather than those that are 4.6 inches (12 centimeters).
In May, a terrifying knife attack committed by an Afghan immigrant took place in Mannheim and left four people injured and one person dead. The attack occurred at an anti-Islamist political rally and a livestream video shows what appears to be the leader of a right-wing campaign group being pursued by the attacker.
These mass stabbings have prompted Scholz to announce that Germany will begin deporting people from Afghanistan and Syria again - currently, Germany does not carry out deportations to those countries because they have no relationship with the Taliban and they consider the situation in Syria too compromised, AP News reported.