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.
A special committee of the Berlin state parliament released its comprehensive report into the December 2016 Christmas market terror attack on Monday.
The attack at the Breitscheidplatz market was the most serious act of Islamist terrorism in Germany to date. The attacker, Anis Amri, drove a truck into the market, killing 12 people. He was later shot dead by police while on the run in Italy.
The 24-year-old Tunisian national, a small-scale drug vendor and rejected asylum-seeker, was known to police and had been monitored by authorities.
The Biden administration has reached an agreement with German Chancellor Angela Merkel that allows for the completion of a controversial natural gas pipeline between Russia and Germany.
The July 21 deal to complete the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which would double shipments of Russian natural gas to Germany by transporting the gas under the Baltic Sea, has angered the leaders of many countries in Eastern and Western Europe; they argue that it will effectively give Moscow a stranglehold over European gas supplies and open the continent to Russian blackmail.
BERLIN (AP) — A German woman who traveled to Syria to join the Islamic State group and whose husband bought a Yazidi woman as a slave has been charged with membership in a terror group and being an accessory to a crime against humanity, German prosecutors said Wednesday.
The indictment of Leonora M., whose full name wasn’t released because of local privacy rules, is the latest in a string of cases in Germany involving women who went to the area held by IS and were involved in holding women captured by the extremist group as slaves.
… Prosecutors said her husband bought a 33-year-old Yazidi woman as a slave in 2015 with the aim of selling her with her two small children. Leonora M., they said, cared for the woman so that she could be sold on at a profit — which she subsequently was.
Two Syrians and an Iraqi accused of beating and then gang-raping an 18-year-old in Germany have been granted bail, sparking an outcry.
The men, aged 18-21, were granted their freedom after a judge ruled there was no risk they would escape.
The men must report to police frequently, continue to live with their parents, and not approach the alleged victim, Bild reported.
The trio, who are not related by birth or marriage, all came to Germany with their families in 2015.
Once the water recedes over the weekend, not only will the damage become visible, the politics will too
There is an interesting history to the politics of floods in Germany — and a possibility that history might be repeating itself. The official death toll in Germany has risen to 93 this morning, but 1,300 people are still reported missing in the region of Ahrweiler, in western Germany. This is without a doubt the most extreme natural disaster that has hit Germany in living memory.
Police in the German state of Hesse searched multiple locations in connection with investigations involving suspected “Islamic State” extremists, local authorities said Wednesday morning.
Ten search warrants were executed across the state “on suspicion of terrorist financing and the preparation of a serious, state-endangering act of violence” early Wednesday.
The accused included eight men and two women between the ages of 20 and 51, according to a statement by the public prosecutor’s office in Frankfurt am Main and the Hessian State Criminal Police Office.
German federal prosecutors arrested and charged a semi-retired think tank head Tuesday on suspicion of spying for China.
The political scientist, identified as Klaus L., 75, under German privacy laws, ran the Hanns Seidel Foundation in Munich according to broadcaster ARD since 2001 before later establishing the Institute for Transnational Studies.
The foundation is associated with the Christian Social Union (CSU), a sister party of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), in Bavaria.
The former head of Germany’s intelligence agency has criticised the country’s leader Angela Merkel over her immigration policies, saying that they are leading the country into a decline.
Hans-Georg Maassen previously ran the Office for the Protection of the Constitution in Germany for six years before being forced out in 2018 after publicly contradicting the chancellor’s claims that foreigners had been ‘hunted’ in the city of Chemnitz during civil unrest in the area.
The 58-year-old’s remarks at the time, which questioned evidence of such ‘hunts’, caused a huge scandal and rocked Mrs Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU).
The German Parliament has amended Germany’s Criminal Code to ban the flag of Hamas, the terrorist group that rules the Gaza Strip.
The move comes after the green and white flags of Hamas, which seeks the destruction of Israel, featured prominently at pro-Palestinian rallies across Germany during the Gaza conflict in May. Some of those rallies ended in anti-Semitic violence in German cities and towns.
German lawmakers said that banning the Hamas flag was aimed at sending “a clear signal” of support “to our Jewish citizens.” Others, however, dismissed the ban as an empty gesture aimed at silencing critics of the German government’s pro-Islamist foreign policy ahead of upcoming federal elections this September.
