Almost two days after a man armed with a knife killed three people and severely wounded four others at a festival in Germany’s western city of Solingen, musical instruments are still lying on the stage, overhead lights still shining.
“We’ve offered to switch them off. But the police say it’s a crime scene,” says Philipp Müller, who helped organize the festival that should still be taking place.
“It’s all quite dystopian,” he says on Sunday, standing next to what remains of a festival site, now a cordoned-off crime scene. He wants to return the instruments to the musicians, but understands the need to preserve the crime scene.
Müller says he saw the bodies of those who were killed, as well as people being resuscitated on Friday evening. “I had those images in my head all day yesterday.”
The city’s 160,000 residents are facing the challenge of processing the events after the attack at a market square in the city centre during the Festival of Diversity, which was being thrown to celebrate Solingen’s 650th anniversary.
The festivities planned for Sunday to celebrate the city have morphed into memorials.
Those killed in the attack were two men, aged 67 and 56, and a 56-year-old woman. Eight people were wounded, four of them seriously, according to local police chief Thorsten Fleiss. The attacker apparently chose his victims at random but appeared to target their necks, Fleiss said.
Solingen is known as the “City of Blades” in Germany due to its long history of manufacturing swords and knives of all kinds, which now seems horribly ironic.
The attack has also sparked political discussions across Germany about increasing knife attacks and stricter gun laws.
On Saturday night, a 26-year-old Syrian suspect turned himself in and admitted to the attack, according to police. The suspect, who was found with blood-stained clothing, is now being investigated for potential ties to the terrorist group Islamic State.
The incident has exacerbated fear and anger in Solingen, a city already troubled by recent tragic events. In March, four people died in a fire, and in June, an explosion occurred outside a shop. Many in the city still remember a 1993 arson attack that killed five women and girls of Turkish descent.
