Officer dies after attack at anti-Islam rally in Germany
A 29-year-old police officer died on Sunday after being repeatedly stabbed during an attack at an anti-Islam rally in Germany, police reported on Sunday.
A knife-wielding man attacked and wounded several people Friday on the market square in the city of Mannheim in southwest Germany.
Five people taking part in a rally organised by Pax Europa, a campaign group against radical Islam, were wounded in the attack.
The policeman was "stabbed several times in the area of the head" while trying to intervene, local police said in a statement.
Immediately following the attack, he underwent "emergency surgery and was put in an artificial coma", but "died of his injuries" on Sunday, police said.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz said he was "deeply saddened" by the death of the police officer following the "terrible attack".
"His commitment to the safety of all of us deserves the highest recognition," Scholz said on X, formerly Twitter.
Es bestürzt mich zutiefst, dass der mutige Polizeibeamte nach dem furchtbaren Angriff in #Mannheim seinen schweren Verletzungen erlegen ist. 1/2
— Bundeskanzler Olaf Scholz (@Bundeskanzler) June 2, 2024
Finance Minister Christian Lindner told German daily Bild the death of the police officer "moves me deeply and makes me angry about what is happening in our country".
"We must defend ourselves against Islamist terrorism with determination, and we will also strengthen the security authorities financially," Lindner said.
Interior Minister Nancy Faeser on Friday called for a thorough investigation into the circumstances of the attack.
"If the investigations reveal an Islamist motive, this would be a further confirmation of the great danger posed by Islamist acts of violence," she said in a statement.
Germany has been on high alert for possible Islamist attacks since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war, with the country's domestic intelligence chief warning that the risk of such assaults is "real and higher than it has been for a long time".
The country had also seen a spate of attacks on politicians at work or on the campaign trail ahead of EU elections on June 9.
President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said last week that he was worried by the growing trend and said Germans "must never get used to violence in the battle of political opinions".
Scholz and Faeser travel to Bavarian flood area
After the flooding of large areas in southern Germany, Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser (both SPD) are visiting the Bavarian flood area on Monday morning.Â
READ ALSO:Â Forecasters warn of further heavy rain in flooded southern Germany
Both want to get an idea of ​​the situation in Reichertshofen in the Upper Bavarian district of Pfaffenhofen an der Ilm together with Bavaria's state premier Markus Söder and state interior minister Joachim Herrmann (both CSU) and speak to emergency services.
The President of the Federal Agency for Technical Relief, Sabine Lackner, is also expected to attend the meeting.
The flood situation remains tense, especially in parts of Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg, where numerous streams and rivers burst their banks and flooded entire towns.
A state of emergency was declared for several districts, and numerous people had to be rescued from their houses and apartments, some by helicopter. The rescue services are in constant operation and at least one firefighter died in the floods during an operation in the Pfaffenhofen district.
ICE train carriages derail after landslide
A landslide in southern Germany caused two wagons of a diverted ICE to derail. The train's 185 passengers and a car driver were uninjured. It comes amid major disruption to rail traffic in the south due to the flooding issues.Â
Two carriages of the ICE inter-city express train with 185 passengers on board derailed in Schwäbisch Gmünd, Baden-Württemberg, late on Saturday evening following the landslide.Â
According to a railway spokesman, the passengers were uninjured and were evacuated from the train overnight.
"It rumbled a bit. Then everything was actually well organised, no panic, everyone was calm. The emergency services were there quickly and took good care of us," passenger Elena Fabian told news agency DPA.
Schwäbisch Gmünd, which is about 50 kilometres east of Stuttgart, had, like large parts of Baden-Württemberg, seen considerable rainfall since Friday.
According to the spokesperson, the first two carriages of the ICE 510 travelling from Munich to Cologne came off the tracks at around 11:20pm.
The train passengers were initially taken to a nearby kindergarten before being taken by bus to Plüderhausen (Rems-Murr district) and Stuttgart.
It was initially unclear how long the route between Aalen and Stuttgart would remain closed and when long-distance trains would be able to run between Stuttgart and Munich again.
According to Deutsche Bahn, Munich was on Monday not accessible by long-distance trains from Stuttgart, Würzburg and Nuremberg.
German government rebukes far-right AfD for spreading fake minister statement
The German government on Sunday criticised the head of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party for citing a faked statement allegedly from Interior Minister Nancy Faeser.
AfD co-leader Alice Weidel referred to the fake comment in a speech after a knife attack at an anti-Islam rally in the southwestern city of Mannheim on Friday.
Faeser had supposedly warned against sharing footage of the attack for fear it could boost the AfD, the German daily Bild reported.
A video of Weidel reading out the statement at a campaign rally and describing it as a "disgrace" was shared by AfD social media accounts, Bild said.
"We strongly oppose disinformation and the instrumentalisation of the terrible act of violence in Mannheim," the interior ministry posted on X, saying Weidel had "publicly spread a fake statement" by Faeser.
Despite a later correction by Weidel the fake news "continued to spread", the ministry said.
Weidel apologised on Saturday evening, acknowledging that the statement "did not come from the (Federal Ministry of the Interior)".
"We were taken in by a fake during our research, for which we are very sorry," Weidel said on X.
She added however that the "tenor" of her remarks regarding the minister remained "true", even if the statement was false, Weidel said.
"Anyone like Faeser who boasts of having warned about such perpetrators but lets them go around unmolested is out of place in this office," she said.
According to German news outlet t-online, the fake statement originated with an AfD party member who created it using artificial intelligence software ChatGPT.
Association welcomes defence expert's plan to activate 900,000 reservists
The German Reservists' Association has welcomed the proposal by FDP defence expert Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann to activate 900,000 reservists in view of the security situation caused by the Russian war of aggression.
"The chairwoman of the Defence Committee is taking up the idea of ​​the Reservists' Association, and that is a good thing," said its chairman Patrick Sensburg to Germany's editorial network RND.
"We have great potential among the reservists we already have. Many have even declared they will participate voluntarily."
The Bundeswehr has "unfortunately not taken this into account in recent years," he said.
Strack-Zimmermann had expressed alarm at possible Russian plans to attack the West and called for the activation of 900,000 reservists in Germany.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is "training his people for war and putting them in position against the West. We must therefore become capable of defending ourselves as quickly as possible," she told the newspapers of the Funke Media Group on Saturday.
With additional reporting from DPA
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