BERLIN—German authorities are treating the killing of a tourist earlier this month as a possible act of terror after they detained an Islamic State supporter as their prime suspect, prosecutors said on Wednesday.
The man, a Syrian asylum seeker known to authorities as an Islamist extremist, was arrested on Tuesday and is suspected of stabbing two tourists on Oct. 4 in the eastern city of Dresden, prosecutors in the state of Saxony said.
The attack is one in a series of suspected Islamist terror acts perpetrated in Europe in recent weeks that have punctured a period of relative calm when authorities focused on addressing the challenge of the coronavirus pandemic.
Last week, a Russian refugee decapitated a high-school teacher in a town near Paris for showing caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad as part of a civics class about freedom of expression. That came weeks after a Pakistani man stabbed two people in Paris outside the former offices of the Charlie Hebdo magazine, the site of a 2015 terrorist attack. On Aug. 19, prosecutors said a series of apparently deliberate crashes on a Berlin highway was investigated as a possible Islamist terrorist attack.
The suspect in the Dresden attack is 20 years old and arrived in Germany in 2015 as an asylum seeker. He had recently finished serving a three-year juvenile sentence for assaulting a police officer and causing bodily harm, Dresden prosecutors said.
The office of the federal prosecutor, which is responsible for prosecuting terror acts, said it had taken over the case.
The man, who prosecutors identified as Abdullah Al H.H., was also previously jailed for seeking to recruit supporters for Islamic State and inciting violent subversion.
Because of his age, the man was tried and sentenced as a youth offender. His asylum request has been rejected but his presence in the country is being tolerated due to his age and other factors, prosecutors said.
“This crime is reminding us yet again of the danger posed by islamist violence,” Germany’s interior minister, Horst Seehofer, said in a tweet.
Germany isn’t currently deporting rejected Syrian asylum seekers or those found guilty of crimes as it would other nationals because it considers Syria to be in a state of war.
The two victims of the Dresden attack were men from other parts of Germany, one 55 and the other 53; the older man died in a local clinic shortly after being stabbed, while the other recovered after a short treatment and has since left hospital, prosecutors said.
A judge in Dresden issued an arrest warrant that would allow for the suspect to be detained while the investigation proceeds. The man faces possible charges of murder, attempted murder and inflicting severe bodily harm.
The suspect refused to say anything about the accusations at a hearing on Wednesday, according to prosecutors.
Germany suffered a string of Islamist terror acts by asylum seekers in 2016, culminating in an attack on a Berlin Christmas market by a Tunisian drug dealer and known extremist that left 12 dead and was later claimed by Islamic State.
In the following years, German authorities have had to focus on the threat posed by right-wing extremists after a series of racist and anti-Semitic attacks across the country.
Authorities are still regularly detaining suspected members of Islamist terror groups—most of them among the hundreds of thousands of refugees who flowed into the country in 2015 and 2016.
Write to Bojan Pancevski at bojan.pancevski@wsj.com
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