SOLINGEN, Germany (AP) — German Chancellor Olaf Scholz vowed to toughen knife laws and step up deportations of rejected asylum-seekers Monday as he visited the scene of the knife attack in which a suspected Islamic extremist from Syria is accused of killing three people.
Scholz, speaking after he joined regional officials in laying a white rose at a makeshift memorial in the western city of Solingen, said he was “furious and angry” about the attack, in which eight people also were wounded.
The suspect turned himself in to police on Saturday evening, a day after the attack at a festival marking the city’s 650th anniversary. Federal prosecutors said Sunday that he shared the radical ideology of the Islamic State group, which he joined at a point that remains unclear, and was acting on those beliefs when he stabbed his victims repeatedly from behind in the neck and upper body.
The 26-year-old had had his asylum application rejected and was supposed to be deported last year to Bulgaria, where he first entered the European Union, but that failed because he disappeared for a time, according to German media reports.
That has revived criticism of the government on migration and deportation, an issue on which it has long been vulnerable. It has taken steps to defuse the issue, for example with legislation intended to ease deportations of unsuccessful asylum-seekers that was approved by lawmakers in January. It also has launched legislation to ease the deportation of foreigners who publicly approve of terrorist acts.
“We must do everything to ensure that such things never happen in our country, if possible,” Scholz said of the attack. He said that would include toughening knife laws in particular “and this should and will happen very quickly.”
Interior Minister Nancy Faeser earlier this month proposed allowing only knives with a blade measuring up to 6 centimeters (nearly 2.4 inches) to be carried in public, rather than the length of 12 centimeters (4.7 inches) that is allowed now.
“We will have to do everything so that those who aren’t allowed to stay in Germany are sent back and deported,” he said, adding that “we have massively expanded the possibilities to carry out such deportations.”
Scholz said there had been a 30% increase in deportations this year already, but “we will look very closely at how we can contribute to raising these figures even further.” He said measures including border checks on Germany’s eastern frontiers have reduced the number of migrants arriving “irregularly,” but there’s room for improvement there too.
Following a knife attack by an Afghan immigrant in Mannheim at the end of May that left one police officer dead and four more people injured, Scholz vowed that Germany will start deporting criminals from Afghanistan and Syria again.
Germany does not currently carry out deportations to those countries. The government has no diplomatic relations with the Taliban in Kabul, and so far considers the security situation in Syria too fragile to allow deportations there. But Scholz said in June that his government was working on solutions to enable the deportation of convicted Afghans to Afghanistan’s neighboring countries, and there has been discussion in Germany about allowing deportations to Syria.
Critics say there has been little movement since. Interior Ministry spokesperson Sonja Kock said Monday the government is still working “intensively” on that.
Scholz spoke alongside Hendrik Wüst, the governor of North Rhine-Westphalia state and a member of Germany’s mainstream conservative opposition, which has long criticized the government on migration. He said was “thankful” that more action had been announced but “announcements alone won’t be enough.”
“Action must follow,” Wüst said.
Opposition leader Friedrich Merz, the leader of Wüst’s Christian Democratic Union, complained on ARD television Sunday evening that “we have been discussing the consequences of Mannheim for three months … it’s enough. We must now do something together.”
“We have people in Germany we don’t want to have here, and we must ensure that we don’t have even more coming,” Merz said, arguing that such migrants should be turned back at the country’s borders.
The Solingen attack came ahead of state elections this weekend in two eastern regions, Saxony and Thuringia, in which the far-right Alternative for Germany party is very strong and the parties in Scholz’s three-party coalition already looked set for dismal results.
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Moulson reported from Berlin.