A knife attack occurred on Saturday morning on a train line connecting Regensburg and Nuremberg. It left three people injured, one of them seriously, according to local media.
The perpetrator was apprehended and identified as a 27-year-old man of Arab origin with a record of mental illness, the tabloid Bild reported
… The 30-year-old and her “Islamic State” (IS) husband Taha A.-J. “purchased” a Yazidi woman and child.
They were kept as household “slaves” while the couple were living in “Islamic State” (IS) occupied Mosul in 2015.
“After the girl fell ill and wet her mattress, the husband of the accused chained her up outside as punishment and let the child die an agonizing death of thirst in the scorching heat,” prosecutors said during the trial.
“The accused allowed her husband to do so and did nothing to save the girl.”
BERLIN, Oct 24 (Reuters) – German police said on Sunday they had stopped more than 50 far-right vigilantes armed with pepper spray, a bayonet, a machete and batons who were trying to patrol the Polish border to stop migrants from entering the country.
The vigilantes were following a call by the Third Way, a far right-party with suspected links to neo-Nazi groups, for its members to stop illegal crossings near the town of Guben on the German-Polish border.
Acceding to demands from Islamic organizations sponsored by the Turkish government, the city of Cologne, once a stronghold of Christendom in Germany, has authorized mosques in the city to begin sounding Muslim calls to prayer over outdoor loudspeakers. The move, ostensibly aimed at promoting multicultural diversity and inclusion, represents a significant step toward the cultural normalization of Islam in Germany. It is taking German multiculturalism into uncharted territory.
Observers believe that Cologne — famous for its cathedral, the largest Gothic church in northern Europe — is establishing a national precedent, and that many of the more than 3,000 mosques in Germany will soon also begin publicly calling Muslims to prayer. They say that German towns and cities will evoke the sounds and images of the Islamic Middle East.
Mosques in Cologne, including Germany’s largest, will be permitted to broadcast the call to prayer over loudspeakers every Friday afternoon.
The news comes after an agreement was made between the city of Cologne and the Muslim community to ease restrictions, which the city’s mayor announced Monday.
However, the decision has prompted a backlash from some corners of Germany, with one expert contradicting the mayor’s claim the initiative was about diversity, instead calling the call to prayer ‘a show of power.’
… According to police, the large-scale operation was directed against 67 suspected members of a network that has been operating internationally since 2016.
They allegedly provided illicit payment services and laundered funds from criminal acts.
The majority of the 67 suspects are Syrian nationals. The remaining suspects have either German, Jordanian, Lebanese, Turkish or Ukrainian citizenship, Reul said.
Two of the arrested suspects had previously been classified as Islamist threats.
Germany’s centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) have claimed victory in the federal election, telling the party of outgoing Chancellor Angela Merkel it should no longer be in power.
SPD leader Olaf Scholz said he had a clear mandate to form a government, while his conservative rival Armin Laschet remains determined to fight on.
The two parties have governed together for years.
But Mr Scholz says it is time for a new coalition with the Greens and liberals.
So Germany tilts further left with the Greens possible Kingmakers, not that anyone would notice.
The center-left Social Democrats are ahead of the conservative CDU/CSU bloc by around 1%, according to initial projected results. In such a tight race, the possibilities for a coalition are still unclear.
Police in the German city of Hagen announced on Thursday that they have arrested four suspects, after a significant police force was deployed near a synagogue on Wednesday amid concerns about a possible attack.
In response to the reported risk to the synagogue, police imposed restrictions on traffic and pedestrians outside the religious site and surrounding area, with officers also searching several buildings as part of their investigation. The synagogue was forced to cancel an event due to the security situation.
A 29-year-old Afghan man in Germany repeatedly stabbed a 58-year-old landscape gardener who was working in a park in Berlin, allegedly because he didn’t like the fact that as a woman she was working, police said Sunday.
The man stabbed the woman in the neck several times in the city’s Wilmersdorf district on Saturday afternoon.
A 66-year-old man who saw the attack unfold rushed to help the woman but was also stabbed in the neck by the suspect.
Back to gender studies class you go!
Sven Kurenbach still remembers the images of the twin towers of the World Trade Center collapsing and the spontaneous minute of silence at the Berlin police department that followed. When Islamist terrorists weaponized passenger planes on September 11, 2001 — killing nearly 3,000 people — Kurenbach was still head of inspection for the Berlin police’s special units. Today he is Germany’s top investigator into jihadist activities.
Twenty years ago, Islamist terror was still largely an unknown for German security authorities, Kurenbach recalled recently at an event organized by “Mediendienst Integration” in Berlin. Just a dozen officers at the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) had been dealing with it.
German federal prosecutors arrested a woman on Monday suspected of collecting money for the extremist “Islamic State” (IS) group and helping with bank transfers to the Middle East.
The suspect, identified only as Denise S., is thought to have been in contact with female IS members to keep them informed on money being sent to the group.
She is also accused of collecting donations for a woman member to enable her to return to the group after her detention in a Kurdish refugee camp.
Thousands turned out in Berlin on Saturday to protest the government’s CCP virus measures, despite bans against several planned gatherings.
Police banned nine planned demonstrations for Saturday, including one from the Stuttgart-based Querdenker movement, the most visible anti-lockdown movement in Germany. A court ruled in favor of allowing one protest, planned for 500 people, on Saturday and Sunday.
More than 2,000 police officers were stationed around the city to respond to those who showed up despite the bans.
Sixty years on, politicians have made East-West divisions worse
Sixty years ago today, on 13 August 1961, Gerda Langosch (28) was in the middle of making breakfast in her flat in the Kieler Straße 3 in central Berlin when she heard the news on the radio: the Soviet sector, in which she lived, had been sealed off from the Western parts of the city by an ‘anti-fascist protection wall’.
Gerda was stunned. How could the government seal off an entire part of Berlin overnight? She hurried to her parents’ flat a few doors down from where she could see onto the Boyenstraße, which marked the border. And indeed, so-called ‘Spanish Riders’, defensive wooden barriers with barbed wire, had been set up. She and 16 million other Germans would spend the next 28 years of their lives behind the Iron Curtain, whether they liked it or not.
The former capital of Hitler’s Third Reich was divided after World War II. But the people of Berlin were still able to move around freely in the city. That is, until August 13, 1961.
“Brandenburg Gate Closed” — that was the headline used by the Associated Press (AP) news agency in the early hours of August 13, 1961, to announce a truly momentous event: the beginning of the construction of the Berlin Wall.
Built along the fault line between the East and West, it immediately became a symbol of oppression and division. East Germany’s National People’s Army (NVA) and construction crews loyal to the communist German Democratic Republic, or GDR, were deployed to cut off all access routes to West Berlin, initially in most locations with barbed wire.
