Germany’s federal prosecutor has taken over the investigation into a knife attack on a teacher in the western city of Essen, citing suspicion of attempted murder and a possible Islamist motive.
The suspect, a 17-year-old Kosovar student, is accused of stabbing a 45-year-old teacher at a vocational college a week ago, seriously injuring her, the Karlsruhe-based prosecutor’s office said on Friday.
He fled the scene and then stabbed an unrelated man in the back on the street before being shot and severely wounded by police near the city’s main train station, law enforcement said.
According to prosecutors, after those attacks the suspect twice tried to find victims near Essen’s Old Synagogue “without, from his perspective, finding suitable persons to target.”
They said he acted “out of a radical Islamist conviction directed against Germany’s free democratic order,” adding the assaults were “capable of affecting the internal security of the Federal Republic of Germany.”
Federal prosecutors said they assumed the case because of its “special significance.”
The suspect remains in hospital under police guard.
The Old Synagogue is operated by Essen as the House of Jewish Culture and used for exhibitions and events. Religous services are not held there. The current building is a reconstruction, erected in the 1980s, of the synagogue destroyed by the Nazis during the Kristallnacht pogrom on November 9, 1938.