“Federal authorities are turning over each stone,” mentioned German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser of the Social Democratic Party (SPD).
But it’s removed from clear that can reassure voters, significantly as revelations about safety missteps proceed to floor.
Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) was warned by regional authorities of the suspect’s potential violent intentions as early as 2015, based on a report by press company dpa. Saudi Arabian authorities additionally warned German safety officers of the alleged attacker in 2023. Investigations had been then initiated, however the case remained “unspecific,” Holger Münch, the top of the BKA, informed public tv.
The suspect, nevertheless, gave repeated indications of his violent intentions in on-line posts. “I guarantee you 100% that revenge will come quickly. Even if it prices me my life,” he’s presupposed to have written on X final December in a now-deleted submit. “I critically anticipate to die this 12 months,” one other such submit reads.
The atypical profile of the suspect — a 50-year-old refugee from Saudi Arabia who styled himself as a girls’s rights activist, was reported to have sympathized with the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), and whom German authorities characterize as “Islamophobic”— might have predisposed authorities to miss warning indicators, specialists say.
“In Germany, individuals assume very strongly in established, inflexible classes of right-wing extremist, left-wing extremist, Islamist,” mentioned Peter Neumann, a terrorist and safety professional at King’s College London, in an interview with Spiegel. “A second drawback is that it has lengthy been assumed that psychological sickness is by and enormous irrelevant within the struggle towards terrorism.”
