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DÜSSELDORF, Germany — A Syrian man suspected of belonging to the Daesh terror group pleaded guilty Tuesday to killing three people and wounding 10 more in a stabbing spree at a German summer festival last year.
Issa Al Hasan, 27, made the confession at the start of his trial, held under tight security at the higher regional court in Duesseldorf.
In a statement read out by his lawyer, Hasan, sitting under police guard behind a protective glass screen, admitted having "committed a grave crime".
"Three people died at my hands. I seriously injured others," Hasan said of the attack in August in the western city of Solingen.
"Some of them survived only by luck. They could have died, too," he said in the statement.
"I deserve and expect a life sentence."
The stabbing spree at the mid-summer street festival was one of a string of attacks that shocked Germany and stoked security fears.
Hasan was an asylum seeker from Syria who had been slated for deportation.
German authorities' failure to remove him from the country fired a bitter debate over immigration that heated up in the run-up to national elections in February this year.
Hasan faces charges including three counts of murder, 10 counts of attempted murder and membership of a foreign terrorist organisation.
'Revenge' for Muslims
Prosecutors say he set out to harm "nonbelievers" at the "festival for diversity" in the centre of the western city of Solingen.
Hasan allegedly saw his targets "as representatives of Western society" and sought "to take revenge against them for the military actions of Western states".
A Daesh member whom Hasan had contacted that month allegedly encouraged him to go ahead with the plan and promised him that the group would claim it and use it for propaganda purposes.
The group later said via its Amaq outlet on the messaging app Telegram that an IS "soldier" had carried out the attack in "revenge" for Muslims "in Palestine and everywhere".
Prosecutors say Hasan had filmed videos in which he pledged allegiance to IS and forwarded them 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.
In the statement read out by his lawyer, Hasan said he had "killed and injured innocent people, not unbelievers".
"Christians, Jews and Muslims, we all are cousins, not enemies."
Immigration debate
The stabbing spree 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.
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, 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.
And in January, a man with a kitchen knife attacked a group of kindergarten 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 February 23 elections.
Just 10 days before the vote, an 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.
The biggest gains however 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.