- Right-wing Alternative for Germany council candidate stabbed in Mannheim
- The attack comes days after the knife attack in the same city in Germany.
A member of a German right-wing party was stabbed and wounded in Mannheim, just days after a knife attack killed a police officer and He left five other people injured in the same city during a demonstration against Islam.
Heinrich Koch, a local council candidate for the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, was confronted on Tuesday afternoon by someone trying to tear down an election poster near the city’s market square, causing him to attack. with a knife.
Koch, 62, was kidnapped to the hospital, where he is being treated for non-life-threatening injuries.
One suspect was arrested on Tuesday night, but a search is underway for two others, local police confirmed.
AfD state president Marjus Frohnmainer said: “We are shocked and dismayed.”
The attack comes after a 29-year-old police officer died following a knife attack in the southwestern city of Mannheim last week, which also left five people injured.
Heinrich Koch, a local council candidate for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, was stabbed on Tuesday afternoon in Mannheim, just days after a knife attack in the same city.
The stabbing of right-wing German politician Heinrich Koch comes days after a stabbing attack in Mannheim, which left one dead and five injured. The man who injured five and killed one last week has been identified as Sulaiman Ataee (pictured), 25, who emigrated to Germany from Afghanistan in 2014 when he was just 15 years old.
Chaos erupted at the anti-Islam rally on Friday when a man wearing a dark hooded jacket and an attacked tracksuit began violently brandishing a large sword.
Flowers and candles are left in the city center of Mannheim as a tribute to the victims of the attack.
German police pay tribute to colleague who died after being stabbed
The agent, identified by the German media as Rouven L. and who was kept alive thanks to an extracorporeal circulation device, would have been “stabbed several times in the head,” after a 25-year-old Afghan stabbed limbs several times. from a group that describes itself as opposed to “political Islam” on Friday.
Tuesday’s attack is the latest in a series against the country’s politicians that has raised concerns about growing political violence in Germany.
Last month, Franziska Giffey, Berlin’s top economic official, former mayor and former federal minister, was attacked at an event at a local library by a man who approached her from behind and hit her with a bag containing a hard drive. , the police reported. saying.
A week earlier, a candidate from Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s party was beaten in the eastern city of Dresden while campaigning for this week’s elections to the European Parliament and had to undergo surgery.
Both the government and opposition parties say their members and supporters have faced a wave of physical and verbal attacks in recent months, and have called on police to step up protection of politicians and election rallies.
In February, the German Parliament stated in a report that a total of 2,790 attacks on elected representatives had occurred in 2023. Greens representatives were disproportionately affected in 1,219 cases, AfD representatives in 478 cases and SPD representatives in 420 cases.
