On Tuesday evening, there was a threatening situation at the Wuppertal Christmas market. An Algerian man, who had previously been carrying a cutter knife, stormed through the Kerstenplatz square in Elbfeld bare-chested and climbed onto barriers. Several police officers then arrived and arrested the man. NIUS has a video of the police operation.
The video clip, which was shared on social media, shows a short and relatively hectic police operation: several officers run to the barriers and shout in the direction of the shirtless man: ‘Stop, police!’. Later you can hear: ‘Get down on the ground! Get down on the ground!’ A man without a T-shirt, who had previously climbed onto barriers, is arrested.
When asked by NIUS, the police confirmed the authenticity of the video. According to information from NIUS, the man is said to have got into a rage at around 06:15 p.m. because he had been refused entry to a café on Gathe, a main street in the centre of Wuppertal with numerous cafés, amusement arcades, bars and shops. There, the 26-year-old Algerian pulled out a box cutter and allegedly said to the café owners: ‘Fucking Albanians! Why won’t you let me in?’ The café operators blocked the door and then alerted the police.
After the man was refused entry to the café, he allegedly took off his T-shirt and ran towards the Christmas market on Neumarkt, where he made threats and was arrested. The man’s demeanour was aggressive. According to current information, the man is said to have thrown away the cutter knife on the way to the Christmas market, but the police did not know this at the time of the arrest.
According to NIUS information, the suspect is a 26-year-old Algerian who is known to the police for several offences. According to the police, the man is said to have been drunk and under the influence of drugs. According to the public prosecutor’s office, there are no indications of a religiously motivated offence. According to information from NIUS, the man does not have a valid residence permit in Germany. The Algerian had already been deported in 2020, but subsequently re-entered the country illegally. However, an arrest warrant was not issued after the incident on Tuesday because the investigators lack clear evidence of the offence.
Meanwhile, officials say that the incident shows how sensitively emergency services now react to potentially dangerous situations. In November, a 17-year-old German-Turkish man was arrested in Elmshorn after authorities investigated the initial suspicion that he might have been planning an attack on the Christmas market. Last week, officers arrested a 37-year-old asylum seeker from Iraq who is suspected of planning an attack on Christmas markets, as the German newspaper Welt reported. At the end of November, it became public that the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) assumed in an internal paper that the risk of an attack by Islamists was assessed as ‘persistently abstractly high’. Christmas markets in Germany are a particular focus.