How long before its no longer safe to go to Coles or Woolies
(luckily we don't have Jack the Slasher stores anymore)
Hamburg attack: one dead after man with knife targeted people in supermarket
Investigators on the scene of the supermarket attack in Hamburg. Pic: AFP
ANTON TROIANOVSKI
Dow Jones
9:48AM July 29, 2017
A rejected asylum applicant from the United Arab Emirates killed one person and injured six others in a stabbing rampage at a Hamburg supermarket.
The attack could reignite debate over security and immigration as the German election approaches.
The 26-year-old suspect, whose identity wasn’t released, couldn’t be deported because he lacked identity papers, Hamburg Mayor Olaf Scholz said in a statement.
“It further makes me angry that the attacker appeared to be someone who sought protection among us in Germany and then turned his hatred against us,” Mr Scholz said. “This shows how urgently the legal and practical obstacles to deportation must be removed.”
The attack began in a supermarket in the Barmbek section of northeast Hamburg, where the suspect stabbed a 50-year-old German man to death with a large knife, police said. The attacker injured five others, at least some of them as he fled, and a 35-year-old Turkish bystander suffered injuries as he subdued the attacker before authorities arrived.
The attacker yelled “Allahu akbar” -- Arabic for “God is great” -- according to one witness interviewed by Germany’s N-TV television and another whose interview with reporters on the scene circulated in a video on social media.
A Hamburg police spokeswoman said she couldn’t confirm the “Allahu akbar” exclamation or that the attack was ideologically motivated. “We are investigating in all directions,” she said.
But the revelation that a rejected asylum applicant appeared to have carried out the attack had the potential to revive Germany’s immigration debate — an issue that has largely faded into the background even as the September 24 national election approaches.
Ever since the influx of hundreds of thousands of refugees and migrants to Germany two years ago, Chancellor Angela Merkel has pushed to tighten asylum laws, speed deportations and negotiated with Turkey and north African countries to reduce the number of migrants who reach Europe’s shores.
While several hundred asylum applicants are still crossing into Germany daily, officials say, those numbers are a far cry from the thousands a day seen in 2015. Germany hasn’t had a terrorist attack since last December, when an Islamic State supporter drove a truck into a Christmas market in Berlin, leaving 12 dead.
The anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party, which is hoping to win seats in federal parliament for the first time, claims that Ms Merkel’s policies on migration and deportation are too lax. Support for the party has dropped into the single digits from around 15 per cent in the wake of the Christmas market attack, and Ms Merkel has appeared to be on course to easily win a fourth term.
The repatriation of rejected asylum applicants continues to vex German security officials. Migrants generally can only be deported to their countries of origin if they have papers, and German officials say that some countries have been dragging their feet in issuing documents to citizens of theirs who came to Germany seeking refugee status.
For example, Anis Amri, the suspect in the Berlin Christmas market incident, had been temporarily detained months before he carried out the truck attack because he was flagged for deportation. But his native Tunisia didn’t immediately agree to take him back and was slow to issue the papers necessary for him to be deported, according to German officials. Dow Jones Newswires
