Police were searching for an unidentified assailant on Saturday, hours after a stabbing attack at a festival in the western German city of Solingen left three people dead and injured.
Police said in a statement early Saturday that eight people were injured, five of them seriously, up from the four seriously injured that police had previously reported.
“Both the victim and witnesses are currently being questioned. Police have now formed a large team to search for the culprits,” police said.
Police said the incident happened around 9.40pm on Friday when a man attacked multiple people with a knife, but the motive is unclear.
“The perpetrators must be caught immediately and punished to the fullest extent of the law,” German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said in a post on X.
German Interior Minister Nancy Faser said security services were doing all they could to arrest suspects and investigate the background to the attack.
The attack took place in Solingen's Vronhof market square, where a live band was playing, during festivals marking the 650th anniversary of the founding of the city in North Rhine-Westphalia, which borders the Netherlands.
A German musician known as Topic was performing on a nearby stage when the incident happened, and said he was informed of what had happened but told to carry on playing “to avoid causing mass panic,” he wrote on Instagram.
He was eventually ordered to stop, and “the perpetrator was still at large, so we hid in a nearby store while a police helicopter circled overhead,” Topic wrote.
Authorities canceled the remainder of the weekend's festivities.
The gunman was specifically aiming for people's throats, one police spokesman said, after a second spokesman neither confirmed nor denied that detail, pointing to a press conference scheduled for the afternoon.
Fatal stabbings and shootings are relatively rare in Germany, and earlier this month the government said it would tighten regulations by shortening the maximum length of knives that can be carried in public.
In June, a 29-year-old police officer was stabbed to death during a raid on a right-wing demonstration in Mannheim, and in 2021, several people were injured in a stabbing incident on a train.
North Rhine-Westphalia state Interior Minister Herbert Reul visited the scene early Saturday and told reporters it was an attack on human life but declined to speculate on a motive.
