Hamburg, Oct. 5, 2020 (dpa/Naija247news) Authorities on Monday said an attack on a Jewish student, outside a synagogue in the German city of Hamburg, is being treated as attempted murder.
Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!The Police said a 26-year-old student was struck on the head with a shovel on Sunday night as he was about to enter the synagogue.
The attack occurred in Hamburg as worshippers were celebrating the Sukkot holiday.
The Police and the public prosecutor’s office said that the initial findings indicated the attack was motivated by anti-Semitism.
Sources told dpa that the alleged attacker was carrying a piece of paper in his trouser pocket with a picture of a swastika on it.
The Police added that the suspect, a 29-year-old German citizen with Kazakh roots, was also acting in an extremely confused manner.
German Foreign Minister, Heiko Maas, was quick to condemn the attack, which he stressed was “not an isolated incident’’.
He described it in a tweet as “disgusting anti-Semitism”.
Germany has seen a rise in anti-Semitic incidents, most recently at protests against coronavirus restrictions, which have been partially fuelled by conspiracy theories about a nefarious global elite and have also attracted support from right-wing extremists.
In 2019, an armed man tried and failed to storm a synagogue in the city of Halle on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, before going on to shoot dead two people nearby.
The suspect is a registered resident of Berlin, although investigators have since discovered that he hasn’t lived in the German capital since 2019.
The Police said the suspect flat was searched and data storage devices were taken for assessment.
The Police also said the victim was not critically injured in the attack, although the local Hamburger Abendblatt newspaper reported that the young man was being treated in intensive care.