Latest news with #HolocaustMemorial
Washington Post
3 days ago
- Washington Post
Syrian man charged with attempted murder in Berlin Holocaust Memorial stabbing
BERLIN — Germany's top prosecutor has filed charges against a Syrian man in connection with a stabbing attack at Berlin's Holocaust Memorial in February that seriously wounded a Spanish tourist . The suspect sought to use the alleged crime to join the militant Islamic State group, the federal prosecutor said. The charges were filed July 18 and announced Tuesday.
Arab News
3 days ago
- Politics
- Arab News
Syrian charged over Berlin Holocaust memorial stabbing
FRANKFURT: A Syrian man who allegedly supports the Daesh group has been charged with attempted murder over the stabbing of a Spanish tourist at Berlin's Holocaust Memorial, prosecutors said Tuesday. The suspect, a refugee partially identified as Wassim Al M., is said to have seriously injured the 30-year-old man at the landmark in the German capital in February. It was one of a series of attacks blamed on foreign nationals that fueled a bitter debate about immigration in the run-up to Germany's general election. The suspect 'shares the ideology of the foreign terrorist organization Islamic State (IS)' and has 'radical Islamist and antisemitic views,' federal prosecutors said in a statement. He had traveled from the eastern city of Leipzig, where he had been living, to Berlin to target 'alleged infidels, whom he regarded as representatives of a Western form of society that he rejected,' prosecutors said. Shortly before the stabbing, the suspect, who was 19 at the time, sent a photo of himself to IS members so the group could claim responsibility for the attack, they said. The tourist, from the Basque Country in northern Spain, was wounded in the neck during the attack at Berlin's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a somber grid of concrete steles located near the Brandenburg Gate and the US embassy. The suspect, who was arrested shortly after the attack and is in pre-trial detention, has also been charged with causing serious bodily harm and attempted membership of a foreign terrorist organization. Officials said previously he had arrived in Germany in 2023. The attack was one of several which shocked Germany ahead of the general election, which saw a doubling in the vote-share for the far-right, anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD). The election was won by the center-right CDU/CSU, which has since taken power at the head of a coalition and moved swiftly to introduce stricter curbs on immigration. The new government under Chancellor Friedrich Merz has signalled it is trying to resume deportations to Syria, which have been suspended since 2012.
The Independent
3 days ago
- The Independent
Syrian man charged with attempted murder in Berlin Holocaust Memorial stabbing
Germany's top prosecutor has filed charges against a Syrian man in connection with a stabbing attack at Berlin's Holocaust Memorial in February that seriously wounded a Spanish tourist. The suspect sought to use the alleged crime to join the militant Islamic State group, the federal prosecutor said. The charges were filed July 18 and announced Tuesday. The man, who was only identified as Wassim Al M. in line with German privacy rules, allegedly sent a photo of himself to members of the group before the stabbing to give the militants the opportunity to claim responsibility for the crime, authorities said. He was allegedly seeking to kill Jews in the attack, officials said. He is charged with attempted murder, dangerous bodily harm and attempted membership in a terrorist organization abroad. The man, then 19 years old, was arrested nearly three hours after the Feb. 21 attack when he approached officers with blood on his hands and clothes. He has remained in custody since then. The attack took place two days before a German national election that saw migration become a critical issue, pushed to the forefront by five deadly attacks involving immigrants in the nine months leading up to the vote. The violence occurred at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a field of 2,700 gray concrete slabs near the Brandenburg Gate in the heart of Berlin, which honors the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust under the direction of Nazi Germany. The suspect arrived in Germany in 2023 as an unaccompanied minor and successfully applied for asylum, investigators said. He lived in Leipzig.
Associated Press
3 days ago
- Associated Press
Syrian man charged with attempted murder in Berlin Holocaust Memorial stabbing
BERLIN (AP) — Germany's top prosecutor has filed charges against a Syrian man in connection with a stabbing attack at Berlin's Holocaust Memorial in February that seriously wounded a Spanish tourist. The suspect sought to use the alleged crime to join the militant Islamic State group, the federal prosecutor said. The charges were filed July 18 and announced Tuesday. The man, who was only identified as Wassim Al M. in line with German privacy rules, allegedly sent a photo of himself to members of the group before the stabbing to give the militants the opportunity to claim responsibility for the crime, authorities said. He was allegedly seeking to kill Jews in the attack, officials said. He is charged with attempted murder, dangerous bodily harm and attempted membership in a terrorist organization abroad. The man, then 19 years old, was arrested nearly three hours after the Feb. 21 attack when he approached officers with blood on his hands and clothes. He has remained in custody since then. The attack took place two days before a German national election that saw migration become a critical issue, pushed to the forefront by five deadly attacks involving immigrants in the nine months leading up to the vote. The violence occurred at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a field of 2,700 gray concrete slabs near the Brandenburg Gate in the heart of Berlin, which honors the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust under the direction of Nazi Germany. The suspect arrived in Germany in 2023 as an unaccompanied minor and successfully applied for asylum, investigators said. He lived in Leipzig.
Extra.ie
24-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Extra.ie
Bob Geldof Issues Impassioned Plea to the People of Israel about Imposed Starvation in Gaza
Responding to the appallingly grim pictures taken in Gaza of starving children, and published by the Express and the BBC today, in a moving statement, the Irish singer – and founder of Band Aid and Live Aid – asks the people of Israel: 'Have you become so inured to the similar images of your own historic horror that you cannot feel or see anything anymore?' Bob Geldof has made an extraordinary, impassioned plea to the people of Israel to end the starvation and killing of Palestinians. The founder of Band Aid and Live Aid was asked by the Express newspaper to respond to pictures published by them, and by the BBC today, of skeletal, starving children, who have been denied aid by the Israeli government and army. 'What has happened to the Israeli people?' Geldof asks. The question is all the more powerful, coming from a man who has long been active in Holocaust Memorial activities and events. Bob Geldof is a Founding Patron of the British Holocaust Museums Aegis Trust for Genocide Studies. He was among those who gave the inaugural address in Westminster Hall, for the first National Holocaust Day Memorial in the UK. The lead singer with the hugely successful Irish rock outfit The Boomtown Rats also received the Lyndon Baines Johnson Moral Courage Medal from the Houston Holocaust Museum of the United States of America. 'Whatever the titanic enormity of your own past and current suffering, what has happened to you,' he asks of the Israeli people, 'that you should allow this for even one fraction of a second? That you should create and perpetuate the suffering of this tiny little speck of humanity?' The shocking images of starving children in so many ways speak for themselves, as the effects of the genocide – now widely accepted as being perpetrated against the Palestinian people – are shown in all of their appalling barbarity. 'Your government and your army seem to be out of control,' Geldof insists. 'Every word from their mouths is a distortion of reality and the truth. Why do you, the sovereign state of Israel, tolerate and permit this? Why do you force people into helpless ghettoes and then purposely starve them? Or seemingly randomly shoot them as they approach for the scant food you dangle in front of their starving bodies?' It is one of the most powerful indictments yet of a policy that has seen people die in their tens of thousands – and which has now extended to the use of starvation as a tactic – not just of war, but of a thinly veiled campaign to steal the land and 'ethnically cleanse' the Gaza strip of Palestinians. 'It is simply no longer possible,' Geldof charges, 'to blame the current rhetoric or actions of your Prime Minister, the extremists in your government, the policies of that government or the actions of your military on the disgusting, barbarous and murderous events of Oct 7. You are way, way past that now. 'Whatever your war aim once was and however justifiable you felt that to be, at what point did the aim become the deliberate starvation of a terrified, tormented, traumatised population?' he asks. All over the world, there is an increasing awareness of the inescapable truth that what is taking place in Gaza – what is being done there by the Israeli army in the name of the people of Israel – is utterly beyond the pale, and must be stopped. But the political response is sadly, desperately, behind that of ordinary people. 'Has hatred consumed you such that extravagant evil is the permissible norm?' the Irish rock hero asks. 'Has revenge so curdled your moral sense that all pain, all terror, all agony appears as victory? Has a false and foul sense of destiny enabled an equally delusional notion of national prerogative and right?' There is, of course, a solution to the madness. It is staring the world in the face – and yet so many politicians and leaders are being mealy-mouthed in the face of the horrors. In a tone that is reminiscent of his pleas in 1984, when he responded to the famine in Ethiopia by launching the Band Aid single 'Do They Know It's Christmas?' – which went in ti become one of the biggest selling singles of all time, he now has this to say. 'Feed the children of Gaza and they're tormented, terrified, broken, and panicked mothers,' Geldof pleads. 'Do it tonight before you settle into your unthreatened dinners and the latest Netflix soap and your heavily censored news reports and online feeds. There is no argument in the world, no war aim, no imagined future that justifies this photograph and it's abysmal and shameful, disgusting truth.' Geldof emphasises finally how impossible it is to believe that the people who themselves suffered the monumental, murderous atrocities of the holocaust should now be responsible for such an appalling degradation of an entire people: the Palestinian people. 'I am incredulous that it is you Israelis that are doing this,' he concludes. 'how? How did you get to here guys? How did it ever get to be so base? Shame on you.' • The full text of Bob Geldof's statement can be viewed on
