A 26-year-old Syrian asylum seeker has surrendered to police who said he confessed to trying to kill as many people as possible during a deadly stabbing rampage at a German diversity festival for which the Islamic State group claimed responsibility.
The suspect, identified only as Issa Al H. due to German privacy laws, said he randomly attacked festival attendees "due to his radical Islamic convictions," federal prosecutors said Sunday, Reuters reported.
Three people were killed and eight were wounded during Friday's bloodbath in a crowd gathered in the central market square of Solingen.
On Saturday, the Islamic State said the attack on Solingen's "Festival of Diversity" was carried out by an unidentified "soldier of the Islamic State."
It also said the attacker targeted Christians to "avenge Muslims in Palestine and everywhere." Victims were stabbed from behind in the head and upper body.
Issa Al H. surrendered on Saturday and allegedly told authorities he "shares the ideology of the foreign terrorist organization Islamic State" and wanted "to kill the largest possible number of those he considers unbelievers," the Associated Press reported, citing a statement from the Office of the Federal Prosecutor.
He was ordered held on suspicion of murder, membership in a terrorist organization and related offenses during a court hearing.
The suspect is a Syrian citizen who applied for asylum in Germany, AP said, citing police.
Der Spiegel magazine said he arrived in Germany in late 2022 and the dpa news agency said his asylum claim was denied. He was supposed to have been deported last year, according to reports.
He had been living in a home for refugees in Solingen that was searched on Saturday, said Herbert Ruel, interior minister of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia.
The attack on the diversity festival came weeks after two Austrian teens with alleged ties to the Islamic State group were accused of plotting a suicide attack outside a scheduled Taylor Swift concert in Vienna.
The Islamic State, which grew out of the al-Qaida network, declared a caliphate in large parts of Iraq and Syria in 2014 and imposed a harsh form of Islamic rule there before losing control of the territory in 2019.
