I deserve a life sentence: Syrian admits triple murder at German festival
Issa al-Hasan, 27, a suspected member of the Islamic State group, made the confession at the start of his trial, held under tight security in Duesseldorf.
The attack at the mid-summer street festival in Solingen in August 2024, which also injured 10 people, was one in a series of attacks attributed to asylum seekers and migrants that pushed immigration to the top of the political agenda in Germany.
Hasan was an asylum seeker from Syria who had been slated for deportation, but authorities had failed to remove him from the country.
He is charged with three counts of murder, 10 counts of attempted murder and membership of a foreign terrorist organisation.
Sitting behind a protective glass screen, he admitted in a statement read by his lawyer that he had ' committed a grave crime '.
'Three people died at my hands. I seriously injured others,' Hasan said. 'Some of them survived only by luck. They could have died, too.
'I deserve and expect a life sentence.'
Prosecutors say he set out to harm 'non-believers' at the 'festival for diversity'. He allegedly saw his targets 'as representatives of Western society' and sought 'to take revenge against them for the military actions of Western states'.
IS later posted on messaging app Telegram that a 'soldier' had carried out the attack in 'revenge for Muslims in Palestine and everywhere'.
Video footage allegedly showed Hasan pledging allegiance to IS. Prosecutors said he forwarded the tapes on to his IS contact just before he committed the attack.
Hasan did not specifically address his alleged motivations for carrying out the attack or his supposed IS membership.
A psychiatric expert told the court that the accused had denied being a radical Islamist.
Two months before the attack in May 2024, a man with a knife attacked people at an anti-Islam rally in Mannheim, fatally wounding a police officer who intervened.
The Afghan suspect went on trial in February and is also alleged to be sympathetic to the IS group.
In December the same year, a Saudi man was arrested after a car ploughed through a Christmas market crowd in the eastern city of Magdeburg, killing six people and wounding hundreds.
In January, a man with a kitchen knife attacked a group of children in Aschaffenburg, killing a two-year-old boy and a man who tried to protect the toddlers.
A 28-year-old Afghan man was arrested at the scene of the attack, which came during campaigning for Feb 23 elections.
Just 10 days before the vote, another Afghan man was arrested on suspicion of driving a car through a street rally in Munich, killing a two-year-old girl and her mother and injuring dozens.
The centre-right CDU/CSU, which demanded tough curbs on immigration in the wake of the attacks, came first in the election with 28.5 per cent of the vote.
But the biggest gains were made by the far-Right Alternative for Germany (AfD), which saw its share of the vote more than double to over 20 per cent.
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