BERLIN, Germany (AFP) — German police said Friday that a man was seriously wounded in an apparent stabbing at central Berlin’s Holocaust memorial near the US embassy. A suspect was later apprehended.
“A man was seriously injured by an unknown person” at the site, police said, adding that “rescue workers are caring for several people on site who had to witness the events” and that “the victim is undergoing surgery.”
Police later said they had arrested a male suspect near the site of the suspected stabbing.
“We just arrested a male suspect,” police spokesman Florian Nath said. “It’s probably the suspect that attacked the 30-year-old Spanish citizen at 6 p.m. here at the memorial,” he told journalists at the scene.
Nath added later that the suspect “had blood on his hands.”
An AFP photographer witnessed the man approaching police to talk to them at the memorial, about three hours after the attack.
Police then wrestled him to the ground and handcuffed him, with one officer shouting “we have the suspect” to his colleagues.
Before apprehending the suspect, police said they “don’t know anything about [the] motive.”
Police armed with assault rifles were at the cordoned-off Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a somber grid of concrete steles located near the iconic Brandenburg Gate, commemorating Jewish victims of the Holocaust.
Members of the emergency services use a crane as they work at the scene where a person was stabbed near the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, Germany on February 21, 2025. (Odd Andersen/AFP)
An AFP reporter at the scene witnessed dozens of police cars and a firetruck with an attached cherry picker crane apparently being used to try to gain a bird’s eye view of the sprawling site to look for the fugitive.
The Bild daily labeled the incident as a “knife attack” and said emergency services were treating several people for shock.
Berlin fire services spokesman Dominik Pritz said six people who had witnessed the attack were being cared for by the rescue service.
Spate of attacks
The incident came two days before German national elections and after a series of deadly attacks that have shocked Germany, including car-rammings and stabbing sprees.
German police said earlier Friday they had arrested an 18-year-old Russian man on suspicion of planning a “politically motivated” attack in Berlin.
The man was detained late Thursday in the state of Brandenburg, which surrounds Berlin, police and prosecutors said in a statement.
Authorities did not provide further details about the alleged attack plot, but the Tagesspiegel newspaper reported the suspect was Chechen and was believed to have been planning an attack on the Israeli embassy.
Riot police and specialist officers were involved in making the arrest, which came after a tip-off, officials said.
Germany has grown increasingly alarmed about rising anti-Jewish sentiment since the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel that sparked the war in Gaza.
Police officers work at the cordoned-off scene where a person was stabbed near the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin on February 21, 2025. (Odd Andersen/AFP)
A record 5,164 antisemitic crimes were recorded in 2023 in Germany, compared with 2,641 in 2022, according to figures from the federal domestic intelligence agency.
In an attack in early September, German police shot dead a young Austrian known for his ties to radical Islam as he was preparing to attack the Israeli consulate in Munich.
Other attacks have recently shocked Germany.
In December a man drove an SUV at high speed through a Christmas market crowd, killing six people and wounding hundreds in the eastern city of Magdeburg.
In another attack in January, a man with a kitchen knife attacked a kindergarten group, killing a two-year-old boy and a man who tried to protect the toddlers.
Another major attack followed just 10 days before the election when a man plowed a Mini Cooper car through a street rally in Munich.
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