In a courtroom in Berlin on Thursday, prosecutors said that a 19-year-old Syrian man who stabbed a Spanish tourist in February had been out to “target a person of the Jewish faith” at the city’s main Holocaust monument.  

The suspect, named in the German media only as Wassim Al M., is accused of being a supporter of the Islamic State terrorist group.

Al M. approached his victim, 30, from behind among the concrete steles of the memorial, according to prosecutors, and inflicted a five-inch cut to his throat with a knife.

The victim was rushed to hospital, where he underwent an operation in a state of induced coma. He later recovered from his injuries.

Wassim Al M. had “internalised IS ideology, rejected the Western way of life, and was convinced that a holy war against infidels must be waged worldwide,” prosecutors said, according to the AFP news agency.

He shouted “Allahu akbar”, or Allah is the greatest, after the attack, witnesses said.

Al M. was living in Leipzig, southwest of Berlin, and traveled to the capital to commit the attack, prosecutors said, adding he had been “driven by the escalation of the Middle East conflict.”

A copy of the Quran and a prayer mat were found in Al M.’s possession at the time of his arrest. The assault shocked Germany not only because of where it happened, but also because it occurred two days before the general election of Feb. 23. Immigration and security issues featured heavily in the campaigns ahead of the vote.

According to various estimates, about a million Syrians live in Germany. Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel allowed in millions of refugees from the Middle Eastern, often with little or no screening, during the Syrian Civil War.

The Syrian immigrants’ arrival coincided with a spike in antisemitic incidents, which peaked last year with an all-time high of 8,627 cases. The figure constituted an 80% increase over the 2023 total, according to the Federal Association of Research and Information on Antisemitism, or RIAS, which has tracked such incidents nationally since 2018 and in Berlin since 2015.

On average, the 2024 tally amounts to roughly 24 incidents per day last year—or one every hour—the nonprofit organization noted.

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