A knifeman has left several people dead in a horrific rampage at a diversity festival in Germany — where passersby were stabbed in the neck in what police are now reportedly treating as a terror attack.
Three people were killed and four severely injured in the attack in the western German city of Solingen on Friday.
A manhunt has been launched this evening following the incident, which started around 9.45pm during the Festival of Diversity, a few kilometres from Dusseldorf. The festival was part of a series of events to celebrate the city’s 650th birthday.
A man is said to have begun attacking passersby at random before fleeing.
Cops are said to be treating the incident as a terror incident, reports Bild.
“It’s a nightmare,” Philipp Müller, the festival organiser, told reporters.
“I got a call from a stage manager who said, “There are people lying on the ground being resuscitated.”
Haunting photos from the scene show officers and emergency services standing in the darkness, surrounded by blue flashing lights with a helicopter circling above.
Solingen is also known as the ‘City of Blades’, as it has long been known for the manufacturing of fine swords, knives, scissors and razors made by famous firms.
The tragedy comes amid a heated political debate about rising knife violence in German cities.
The festival is understood to have been halted around 10pm as attendees left the area.
The attacker had “stabbed people indiscriminately with a knife”, the Bild daily reported.
In a statement posted online, Tim-Oliver Kurzbach, the mayor of Solingen, said the whole city was in “shock, horror and great grief”.
“We all wanted to celebrate our town’s anniversary together and now we have to mourn the dead and injured,” he said.
The celebrations were marking the city’s 650th anniversary at the Fronhof, a busy shopping area where a stage was set up for live bands.
Kurzbach thanked the emergency services for their work at the scene and expressed sympathy with those who had witnessed the attack.
“It tears my heart apart that there was an attack on our city. I have tears in my eyes when I think of those we have lost. I pray for all those who are still fighting for their lives,” he said.
Hendrik Wuest, the premier of North Rhine-Westphalia state, also expressed his “shock and grief” in a post on social media platform X.
“An act of the most brutal and senseless violence has struck at the heart of our state,” he said.
“The whole of North Rhine-Westphalia stands by the people of Solingen, especially the victims and their families.” Solingen is a city of some 150,000 people located an equal distance from Duesseldorf and Cologne.
People had gathered in the town on Friday evening for the first day of a three-day “Festival of Diversity”, according to the event’s website.
The festival was set to feature music, street theatre, variety shows and comedians in the city centre and several other areas, it said.
Up to 75,000 visitors were expected to attend over the three days.
The Solinger Tageblatt newspaper reported that one of the co-organisers of the festival had come on stage to call off the event.
The crowd were also asked to leave the city centre, it said. Following the announcement, thousands of attendees cleared the area, the paper reported, with a journalist at the scene describing the atmosphere as “ghostly”.
“People left the scene in shock, but calmly,” Philipp Mueller, one of the organisers, told the newspaper.
A witness who spoke to the Tageblatt said he was a few metres from the attack, not far from the stage, and “understood from the expression on the singer’s face that something was wrong”.
“And then, a metre away from me, a person fell,” said the man, Lars Breitzke, who at first thought it was someone who was drunk.
But when he turned around, he saw other people lying on the ground and several pools of blood, he added.
Festival organiser Mueller later told the Tageblatt that the rest of the festival would also be cancelled.
“We’ve just informed all the artists and stand operators,” he said. Germany has seen a series of knife attacks over the past 12 months, with Interior Minister Nancy Faeser promising to crack down on knife crime.
A police officer was killed and five people were wounded in a knife attack at a far-right rally in the city of Mannheim in late May.
