SULAIMANI (ESTA) — Passengers including an off-duty police officer on a regional train in Germany overpowered an Iraq-born man who injured five people including the officer with a knife, AP cited authorities as saying.
A top law enforcement official said the 31-year-old attacker had been investigated for possible “Islamic extremism” while living in a refugee hostel in 2017, according to AP.
The motive for the train attack hadn’t been determined, the official added.
AP reported that four of the injured were treated in hospital for wounds to their hands or face and head, while one victim had been stabbed in the shoulder blade.
The train had just pulled out of the station at Herzogenrath near the border with the Netherlands and was heading for the western German city of Aachen at 7:42 a.m. local time when the man began attacking fellow passengers “randomly and arbitrarily,” AP cited state interior minister Herbert Reul as saying.
He described the attack as “a gruesome crime that was stopped in an enormous act of courage.”
