BERLIN (Reuters) – A man was stabbed and seriously injured at Berlin’s Holocaust memorial, police said on Friday evening, two days before a watershed national election.
Police said they did not know the identity of the male attacker, who was still at large, or motive and were investigating.
Video of the scene showed emergency vehicles and heavily armoured police lined along one side of the memorial site, a vast field of grey concrete pillars where the attack took place. The memorial is across a street from the U.S. Embassy.
“An as yet unidentified male suspect attacked a person standing here, who was so seriously injured that he had to be taken by the fire brigade to hospital for emergency treatment,” police spokesperson Florian Nath said.
The attack occurred around 6 p.m. (1700 GMT). The victim’s life was not in danger and he was being prepared for surgery, he added.
Nath added that police do not believe there is any imminent danger for the public.
The monument, one of the German capital’s most sacred sites, commemorates the 6 million Jews murdered by Adolf Hitler’s Nazis during World War Two, one of the darkest episodes in human history and a continuing focus of German historical atonement.
The area surrounding the monument was sealed off.
The national election campaign, in which polls suggest a far-right party could come in second place for the first time in nine decades, has been marred by a series of high-profile attacks. One of those was a stabbing blamed on an Afghan immigrant, which prompted a fraught debate on immigration.
Earlier on Friday, an 18-year-old ethnic Chechen was arrested on suspicion of planning an attack on the Israeli Embassy in Berlin, Bild newspaper reported.
(Reporting by Petra Haverkamp and Thomas Escritt; editing by Mark Heinrich and Cynthia Osterman)
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