A Palestinian is released from custody and just a few days later stabs two people on a regional train in Schleswig-Holstein. Five other people are seriously injured. When the 33-year-old is brought before the magistrate, he does not comment on the crime.
After the knife attack in a regional train near Brokstedt in Schleswig-Holstein, the perpetrator made no statements on the matter at the magistrate’s appointment. There he was silent. After the results of the investigation were available, he would speak to his client, said lawyer Björn Seelbach on request.
The 33-year-old stateless Palestinian was arrested on Wednesday after the knife attack as a suspect. Two people died in the act and five were seriously injured. An arrest warrant was issued for the man on two counts of murder and four counts of attempted manslaughter.
The man had been released from custody just a few days before the crime. The chairman of the working group on migration law in the German Lawyers’ Association (DAV), Thomas Oberhäuser, denied on Deutschlandfunk the question of whether the judiciary and administration could have prevented the crime. He referred to legal considerations and requirements in pre-trial detention cases.
At best, the judiciary and administration could have prevented the crime by continuing to hold him in custody, according to Oberhäuser. “But the judiciary decided that that would have been disproportionate to the crime he was accused of.” Ibrahim A. had been in custody since January 2022 after stabbing a man in a homeless shelter.
A district court sentenced him in August to one year and one week in prison for dangerous bodily harm and theft. A. had appealed against this. Shortly before the sentence expired, the arrest warrant was lifted on January 19, 2023.
The deadly knife attack and the way the authorities dealt with it will not only have a legal, but also a parliamentary aftermath. The judiciary committee of the Hamburg Parliament will deal with the case in the coming week. The legal committee of the North Rhine-Westphalian state parliament is to meet in Düsseldorf for a special session.
