Europe's news in English

COPY LINK

CRIME

Man kills son and self with chainsaw

A German man murdered his three-year-old son with a chainsaw before killing himself in an apparent custody dispute, police in Bonn said on Thursday.

Published: 24 March 2011 18:13 CET

Man kills son and self with chainsaw

Photo: DPA

In a gruesome display of violence, the 24-year-old decapitated his son in the woods outside Hennef near Bonn before turning the chainsaw on himself. A jogger on Wednesday found their bodies in a car and alerted the authorities.

The police said the man from Linz in Rhineland-Palatinate was separated from his wife and had picked up the boy from his mother to have an ice cream on March 22, however, they never returned as had been agreed.

Georg Jahn, the lead homicide investigator, said the crime scene was a “horrible sight” and the police chose not to examine the corpses there out of basic decency.

A spokesman for the state prosecutor, Robin Faßbender, said a custody battle was likely behind the horrific crime. The boy’s mother filed a missing person report with police on Wednesday and reported threats made by the father to kill the boy.

Jahn said there had been a previous “incident” in the family, though it could “not be describe as domestic violence.”

Faßbender said the Youth Services Office (Jugendamt) in the Rhine-Sieg district, which is responsible for managing custody, might have known about the threats. On Thursday morning, state prosecutors made a search of the office to secure files on the family’s case and questioned two employees on suspicion of negligent homicide.

READ MORE: Police find missing woman set in concrete

DAPD/mry/djw

Germany arrests Syrian man accused of plotting to kill soldiers

The suspect, an “alleged follower of a radical Islamic ideology”, was arrested on Thursday on charges of planning “a serious act of violence endangering the state”.

The man had acquired two heavy knives “around 40 centimetres (more than one foot) in length” in recent days, prosecutors in Munich said.

He planned to “attack Bundeswehr soldiers” in the city of Hof in northern Bavaria during their lunch break, aiming “to kill as many of them as possible”, prosecutors said.

“The accused wanted to attract attention and create a feeling of insecurity among the population,” they said.

German security services have been on high alert over the threat of Islamist attacks, in particular since the Gaza war erupted on October 7th with the Hamas attacks on Israel.

Police shot dead a man in Munich this month after he opened fire on officers in what was being treated as a suspected “terrorist attack” on the Israeli consulate in Munich.

The shootout fell on the anniversary of the kidnap and killing of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games by Palestinian militants.

The 18-year-old suspect had previously been investigated by authorities in his home country Austria on suspicion of links to terrorism but the case had been dropped.

The incident capped a string of attacks in Germany, which have stirred a sense of insecurity in Germany and fed a bitter debate of immigration.

Three people were killed last month in a suspected Islamist stabbing at a festival in the western city of Solingen.

READ ALSO: ‘Ban asylum seekers’ – How Germany is reacting to Solingen attack

The suspect in the attack, which was claimed by the Islamic State group, was a Syrian man who had been slated for deportation from Germany.

A federal interior ministry spokesman said if an Islamist motive was confirmed in the latest foiled attack, it would be “further evidence of the high threat posed by Islamist terrorism in Germany, which was recently demonstrated by the serious crimes in Mannheim and the attack in Solingen, but also by acts that were fortunately prevented by the timely intervention of the security authorities”.

The Solingen stabbing followed a knife attack in the city of Mannheim in May, which left a policeman dead, and which had also been linked to Islamism by officials.

Germany has responded to the attacks by taking steps to tighten immigration controls and knife laws.

READ ALSO: Debt, migration and the far-right – the big challenges facing Germany this autumn

The government has announced new checks along all of its borders and promised to speed up deportations of migrants who have no right to stay in Germany.

The number of people considered Islamist extremists in Germany fell slightly from 27,480 in 2022 to 27,200 last year, according to a report from the federal domestic intelligence agency.

But Interior Minister Nancy Faeser warned in August that “the threat posed by Islamist terrorism remains high”.

SHOW COMMENTS

Url copied to clipboard!