One of the victims who survived a deadly knife attack carried out by Palestinian migrant Ibrahim A. has now committed suicide six months after the rampage in Brokstadt, Germany.
The 54-year-old woman who took her own life had sat opposite the attacker on the regional train at the time and survived with an injury. However, a young couple, who the German media reported as newly in love, were stabbed to death by the attacker on January 25, 2023.
Five other people were injured but survived. After the stabbing spree, the police arrested the migrant on the spot.
“This tragic case is known to us, our sympathy goes to the relatives,” said a spokesman for the state justice ministry. Earlier, the Flensburger Tageblatt reported about the woman’s death, saying she had suffered from depression even before the attack. The paper stated that the bloody attack exacerbated her existing condition, but the exact reason why the woman took her life remains unknown.
Remix News produced a video short on the deadly attack at the time. The video details how the migrant was never deported despite a long criminal record, including for rape and bodily harm.
“Ibrahim A. entered the country in 2014. Since 2015, he has committed several crimes in North Rhine-Westphalia and Hamburg, including rape. In addition, it is known that he was last released from custody on Jan. 19 in connection with dangerous bodily harm in Billwerder (a district of Hamburg),” said Scleswig-Holstein Interior Minister Sabine Suetterlin-Waack shortly after the attack.
The case prompted a heated debate about Germany’s immigration policies, including its inability to deport criminal migrants. Since the end of April, Ibrahim A. has been charged with murder and attempted murder.
At the time of the stabbing incident, Remix News reported:
Germany has suffered a large number of migrant knife attacks in the past years. In fact, the country saw an average of 50 knife attacks every day in 2022, with a large number of perpetrators being from a migrant background.
Last month, two German schoolgirls were stabbed randomly by an Eritrean migrant, resulting in one death. Two months earlier, a migrant from Jordan stabbed a Ukrainian refugee woman.
In June, an Afghan national brutally stabbed a woman by ramming a knife into her head at a bus stop in Hamburg.
Many of these assaults occur on public transportation. Last month, two Nigerians beat a German train conductor unconscious in Essen. Two months ago, a ticket inspector was stabbed by a Syrian migrant in Dresden. In May of last year, an Iraqi man on a terror watch list went on a stabbing spree that injured five Germans on a regional train in Aachen.
In November last year, a Syrian migrant stabbed four people on a high-speed ICE train on the way to Hamburg in an act that prosecutors say was motivated by Islamic terrorism.
A number of attacks that appeared to have an Islamic motive ended with the attacker being admitted to a psychiatric ward, such as an Iraqi asylum seeker who began praying on a prayer mat and shouting “Allahu Akbar” after ramming motorcyclists on Berlin’s Autobahn in April 2021. In that same year, a Somali man stabbed and killed three German women, one in front of her 11-year-old daughter, but was also admitted to a psychiatric ward despite the man telling investigators he performed the attack to achieve jihad.