An Afghan who is alleged to have killed two people in Germany was in the country due to an “administrative error”, German media has reported.
Bavarian interior minister Joachim Herrmann reportedly claimed the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) had mishandled the case.
News outlets also reported that the suspect had been allegedly terrorising other residents of the refugee shelter where he lived and attacked another refugee with a knife.
On January 22 in the town of Aschaffenburg, in northern Bavaria, the Afghan citizen allegedly killed a 41-year-old man and a 2-year-old child in a knife attack and was then arrested.
According to German authorities, the 28-year-old suspect suffered from “psychiatric problems” and had remained in the country due to a series of administrative errors related to his asylum process.
In June 2023, the BAMF rejected the man’s asylum application and ordered his deportation to Bulgaria under the Dublin Regulation.
Issues arose when Bavaria’s immigration office received notification from the BAMF only six days before the legal deadline to execute the deportation on August 1, 2023.
“It’s impossible to organise a deportation in six days, especially without preparation,” Herrmann stated to German media.
‘The responsibility lies with the BAMF,” he said at a press conference in Munich on January 23 to report on the progress of the investigation.
Once the deadline passed, the asylum procedure then had to be reopened. It remained unresolved in December 2024, two years after the suspect arrived in Germany.
The detainee had reportedly voluntarily requested to return to Afghanistan but was unable to do so due to a lack of documents from the Afghan consulate.
Furthermore, the country faced significant challenges in deporting individuals to Afghanistan because of lack of diplomatic relations with the Taliban regime, although one deportation flight to Kabul was organised in 2024.
Bavaria’s Christian Social Union (CSU) has criticised the federal government’s migration management and demanded urgent reforms at the BAMF.
The CSU argued that individuals holding residence permits in Germany should secure employment; failure to do so should result in losing their right to remain in the country.
Furthermore, anyone found guilty of multiple offences should be expelled from Germany. For those unable to leave or be deported, the party proposed indefinite detention pending deportation.
“You may leave for your home country at any time, but you will no longer regain freedom within Germany,” Alexander Dobrindt, the CSU’s regional chairman, told Die Welt on January 6.
Germany’s opposition leader Friedrich Merz vowed on January 23 to ban people without proper documents from entering the country and increase deportations if he was elected chancellor in the February 23 elections.
Merz promised that if he became chancellor, he would order the interior ministry on his first day in office to permanently take control of all of Germany’s borders and “reject all attempts at illegal entry without exception”.
The case echoed a recent terrorist attack in Magdeburg, where a Saudi citizen, Taleb Jawad al-Abdulmohsen, allegedly carried out a deadly assault.
Saudi Arabia had requested his extradition from Germany but that was not acted upon.
Taleb had arrived in the country in 2006, obtaining refugee status 10 years later.
Both cases have seemed to highlight what many saw as flaws in Germany’s immigration system, where administrative errors and a lack of co-ordination seemed to have allowed individuals with problematic histories to remain in the country.