BERLIN (Reuters) – A Syrian man who killed a German tourist and seriously injured another in an Islamist-motivated knife attack last year in the eastern city of Dresden has been charged with murder and attempted murder, Germany’s top prosecutor said on Thursday.
The GBA Federal Prosecutor’s Office said the 21-year-old suspect, identified as Abdullah A. H. H. under privacy laws, had intended to kill both men in the attack on Oct. 4 for being what he viewed as infidels.
“The suspect acted out of a radical Islamist disposition,” said the GBA. “He chose to punish both his victims with death for being representatives of an ‘infidel’ social order whose freedom and openness he had rejected,” it added.
The Syrian man was arrested about two weeks after the attack. He had come to Germany in 2015 along with thousands of his countrymen who had fled the civil war.
German officials stripped him of his refugee status after he was sentenced to more than two years in prison for terrorism activities and was declared a security threat.
(Reporting by Joseph Nasr; Editing by Madeline Chambers)
