German police arrest suspect in Bielefeld stabbing attack
A suspect who allegedly attacked and injured five people outside a bar in the western German city of Bielefeld has been arrested after an almost two-day search, German media reported.
"The detailed work paid off and we were able to arrest the surprised perpetrator," the state interior minister of North Rhine-Westphalia, Herbert Reul, told dpa news agency after a man was arrested late on Monday evening in the town of Heiligenhaus near Düsseldorf.
According to police, the suspect is a 35-year-old Syrian living in Germany.
Early on Sunday, five men between 22 and 27 — football fans celebrating their team, Arminia Bielefeld, securing the league title in the German third division — were attacked by a suspect wielding a sharp object outside a bar in downtown Bielefeld.
Four of the men were seriously injured.
According to witnesses, the perpetrator attacked his victims indiscriminately with what they called a bladed object.
Footage from the crime scene showed forensics securing a weapon — a walking cane with a retractable blade.
Other guests at the bar overpowered the man and inflicted facial injuries in the process.
He managed to break free and fled on foot, leaving a rucksack behind at the crime scene.
Investigators from the "Kurfürst" homicide squad, led by First Chief Inspector Markus Mertens, recovered the rucksack. According to police, it contained further knives.
Reul said that "after the shocking crime in Bielefeld" investigators had "picked up and pursued every last lead on the perpetrator" with all the resources available.
"Now we need answers as to what motive led the perpetrator to commit the crime," the minister added.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
LeMonde
4 days ago
- LeMonde
After the Alawite massacres in Syria, the challenge of gathering testimonies
To see them, it is necessary to cross the shaded Cheikh Hilal cemetery, pass a small mausoleum and walk among the tombstones toward the edge of a railway line where tanker wagons rust. There, beneath concrete slabs, lie 275 bodies, the vast majority unidentified. These are just some of the victims of the massacre of the Alawite community in the Syrian city of Baniyas and its surroundings, carried out between March 6 and 9 by Islamist factions linked to the Ministry of Defense, foreign jihadists and local armed men. The precise death toll remains unknown. The bloodshed occurred in the aftermath of attacks on government checkpoints by armed supporters of the former regime. Occasionally, a small sign mentions the name and surname of a victim. While watching the security services bury the bodies, the young gravedigger at the cemetery recognized some of the dead. The others remained nameless and no one was allowed to identify them, creating an additional torment for Suzane Khalil, who mourned her husband and two sons, perhaps buried in the cemetery without her knowing for sure. Eyes darkened with grief, this education official welcomed us to her modest apartment in the Al-Qusour district.
France 24
4 days ago
- France 24
New search in Madeleine McCann case finished: Portuguese police
Investigators, who spent three days scouring areas near the southern beach resort where Madeleine disappeared during a family holiday, did not detail the results of their latest searches. Madeleine was just three years old when she vanished from the apartment where her family was vacationing on the Algarve coast, triggering a race to find her -- and massive global media coverage. The new search, which began Tuesday, was carried out at the request of investigators in Germany, who are probing whether a convicted German sex offender was implicated in the disappearance. Between Tuesday morning and Thursday afternoon, around 25 German police officers assisting Portuguese authorities searched for evidence near the Praia da Luz seaside resort, where Madeleine disappeared on May 3, 2007, while her parents had dinner nearby. Using shovels, rakes and a weed whip, investigators combed an overgrown wooded area bordered by several dilapidated, abandoned houses between Praia da Luz and the nearby city of Lagos, said AFP journalists at the scene. They also used ground-penetrating radar and an excavator to search another area around the village of Atalaia, Portuguese media reports said. A previous search in 2023 of a lake near the Ocean Club resort in Praia da Luz yielded no results. That is near one of the lodgings where Christian Brueckner, a convicted rapist now serving a prison sentence in his native Germany, stayed during a stint in Portugal in the 1990s and 2000s. Brueckner, a drifter with a criminal record, was living in a camper van on the Algarve coast at the time Madeleine vanished. A mobile phone registered in his name was traced close to the family's accommodation on the night she went missing. Authorities have played down expectations for the new search effort. "As to whether or not something will be found, personally I'd remain rather prudent towards the results we can expect," Christian Wolters, a spokesman for the Braunschweig prosecutor's office in Germany, which issued the new search warrant, told AFP on Tuesday. 'Cruel rapist' Brueckner, 48, is serving a seven-year sentence for the 2005 rape of a 72-year-old American woman in Praia da Luz. He is due to complete his sentence in September. He was acquitted in October 2024 in Germany at a trial for two other sexual assaults and three rapes committed in Portugal between 2000 and 2017. German authorities in 2020 said they were convinced Brueckner was involved in Madeleine's disappearance, which gained worldwide publicity and has seen several false leads. He has not been charged in connection with the McCann case. Brueckner, who according to German media had a string of previous convictions, including for sexual offences, assault and theft before he was convicted of rape, worked as an odd-job man during his 10 years in the Algarve. He also burgled hotel rooms and holiday apartments. On Tuesday, a journalist from Germany's RTL television recounted his correspondence with Brueckner, and how he had met him in prison. Brueckner, the journalist said, complained that "half the world" considered him a "cruel rapist". He said he wanted to eat steak and drink beer when he is released from prison. He returned to Germany in 2007 -- the year Madeleine disappeared -- settling in Hanover, but still spent time in Portugal. On the 18th anniversary of their daughter's disappearance this year, Madeleine's parents, Kate and Gerry McCann, said they were still determined to find out what happened.
France 24
5 days ago
- France 24
After decades in Assad jails, political prisoner wants justice
Tatari, arrested in 1981 and sentenced to life behind bars, was among scores of prisoners who walked free when longtime ruler Assad was overthrown on December 8 in an Islamist-led offensive. He has made it out alive after 43 years in jail, but tens of thousands of Syrian families are still searching for their loved ones who disappeared long ago in Syria's hellish prison system. "I came close to death under torture," Tatari told AFP in his small Damascus apartment. Since a military field court gave him a life sentence for "collaborating with foreign countries" -- an accusation he denies -- Tatari was moved from one prison to another, first under late president Hafez al-Assad and then his son Bashar who succeeded him in 2000. Showing old pictures of him in his pilot uniform, Tatari said he was not seeking revenge, but stressed that "everyone must be held accountable for their crimes". "We do not want anyone to be imprisoned" without due process, said Tatari. More than two million Syrians were jailed under the Assad dynasty's rule, half of them after anti-government protests in 2011 escalated into civil war, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor. The Britain-based monitor says around 200,000 died in custody. Diab Serriya, co-founder of the Association of Detainees and Missing Persons of Saydnaya Prison, said that Tatari was "the longest-serving political prisoner in Syria and the Middle East". Rights group Amnesty International has called the notorious Saydnaya prison outside Damascus a "human slaughterhouse". Tatari had been detained there, but he said his 15 years in the Palmyra prison in the Syrian desert were the most difficult. 'Wished for death' The Palmyra facility operated "without any discipline, any laws and any humanity", Tatari said. Detainees were "not afraid of torture -- we wished for death", he added. "Everything that has been said about torture in Palmyra... is an understatement." "A guard could kill a prisoner if he was displeased with him," Tatari said, adding that inmates were forced under torture to say phrases like "Hafez al-Assad is your god", although he refused to do so. In 1980, Palmyra witnessed a massacre of hundreds of mostly Islamist detainees, gunned down by helicopters or executed in their cells after a failed assassination attempt on Hafez al-Assad. Tatari said he was completely disconnected from the outside world there, only learning of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union through a prisoner who had returned from a hospital visit. In Sweida prison in the south, where Tatari was transferred after the 2011 revolt began, some inmates had phones that they would keep hidden from the guards. "The cell phone gets you out of prison, it makes you feel alive," he said, recalling how he used to conceal his device in a hole dug in his cell. But after his phone was discovered, he was transferred to a prison in Tartus -- his final detention facility before gaining freedom. Dreams of escape Tatari was one of several military officers who were opposed to Syria's intervention in Lebanon in 1976, and to the violent repression in the early 1980s of the Muslim Brotherhood, Syria's main opposition force at the time. "Many of us were against involving the army in political operations," he said. After two of his fellow pilots defected and fled to Jordan in 1980, he escaped to Egypt and then on to Jordan. But he returned when security forces began harassing his family and was arrested on arrival. His wife was pregnant at the time with their first and only son. For years, the family assumed Tatari was dead, before receiving a proof of life in 1997 after paying bribes, a common practice under the Assads' rule. It was then that Tatari was finally able to meet his son, then aged 16, under the watchful eye of guards during the family's first authorised prison visit that year. "I was afraid... I ended the meeting after 15 minutes," Tatari said. His wife has since died and their son left Syria, having received threats at the start of the protest movement, which had spiralled into war and eventually led to Assad's overthrow. During his time behind bars, Tatari said he "used to escape prison with my thoughts, daydreams and drawing". "The regime getting toppled overnight was beyond my dreams... No one expected it to happen so quickly." © 2025 AFP
