Prosecutors have said the suspect arrested over a stabbing rampage in the western German city of Solingen shares the ideology of the Islamic State group and was acting on those beliefs when he attacked.
The 26-year-old Syrian, who had turned himself in, was identified by federal prosecutors as Issa Al H, with his last name omitted in line with German privacy laws.
A judge at the federal court of justice in Karlsruhe ordered that he be held on suspicion of murder and membership of a terrorist organisation in connection with the knife attack on Friday, which left three dead and eight wounded at a festival marking the city’s 650th anniversary.
In a statement the Office of the Federal Prosecutor said the suspect decided “to kill the largest possible number of those he considers unbelievers” at the festival on the basis of his “radical Islamic convictions”.
Islamic State on Saturday claimed responsibility for the attack without providing any evidence.
Wearing handcuffs and leg shackles, the suspect was taken on Sunday from the police station in Solingen to a first appearance before in court. He had applied for asylum in Germany, police told the Associated Press.
The frenzied attack unfolded over a few minutes on Friday evening at a festival of diversity in Solingen, a city of 160,000 people near Cologne and Düsseldorf. Three people from the region – one woman and two men – were killed and eight were injured, four of them seriously.
Citing officials, the Associated Press reported that a 15-year-old boy was arrested on suspicion that he knew about the planned attack and failed to inform authorities, but that he was not the attacker. Two female witnesses told police they overheard the boy and an unknown person before the attack speaking about intentions that corresponded to the bloodshed.
The attack is already stirring debate about Germany’s asylum policy ahead of regional elections in Saxony and Thuringia on 1 September, where the far-right, anti-immigration Alternative für Deutschland is expected to do well.
The leader of the centre-right CDU opposition party Friedrich Merz said Germany should stop admitting further refugees from Syria and Afghanistan in a letter on his website entitled “enough is enough”.
Germany’s chancellor, Olaf Scholz, who has been under pressure to tackle a rise in knife violence in cities, said on Saturday he was “shocked” by the “terrible event” and stood with the terrorised city in mourning the victims.
The festival , which was supposed to run through to Sunday, drawing up to 25,000 people, was cancelled, as were weekend festivities in nearby towns.
The German DJ Topic, who is from Solingen, said in a post on Instagram he was performing on the stage when security personnel approached him and informed him of the attack.
He was asked to continue his set “to avoid causing a mass panic”, he said. “So I kept playing even though it was incredibly hard.” He said he was told to stop 10-15 minutes later, and “since the attacker was still on the run, we hid in a nearby store while police helicopters circled above us”, he wrote.
“I still can’t believe it … this was supposed to be a free festival for everyone. Really close friends of mine were there with their small kids,” he said in a video recorded in his childhood bedroom. “What’s happening to this world … my thoughts are with all the victims.”
Germany’s federal criminal police office has said there have been about a dozen Islamist-motivated attacks since 2000. One of the biggest was in 2016, when a Tunisian man drove a lorry into a Christmas market in Berlin, killing 12 and injuring dozens.
