(Bloomberg) -- German Chancellor Olaf Scholz pledged to tighten weapons regulations and accelerate the deportation of rejected asylum seekers after three people were knifed to death in Solingen on Friday.
A Syrian man named as Issa Al H. who had avoided deportation after a failed asylum application is in custody accused of carrying out the attack at a festival in the western German city near Dusseldorf and membership of the extremist Islamic State.
Speaking Monday at the site of the assault, in which a further eight people were injured, Scholz characterized the incident as “terrorism.” He told reporters that stricter rules on weapons possession would apply especially to knives and they should and will be adopted “very rapidly.”
“We must also do everything possible so those people who do not have the right to remain here in Germany can be sent back,” he said, adding that a recent law introduced by his government had “massively” increased the effectiveness of deportation efforts.
“But that is not a reason by any means for us to sit on our hands,” he said. “We will look very closely at how we can further increase the numbers.”
The incident has stoked an already heated debate around immigration in Germany and prompted accusations from opposition parties that the government isn’t doing enough to prevent people entering the country illegally.
The issue has been front and center ahead of this Sunday’s elections in Saxony and Thuringia, where the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party could win the biggest share of the vote in both eastern regions.
Even so, the AfD is unlikely to become part of any regional government as rival parties have vowed to cooperate to keep it out of power — a so-called firewall similar to the one that thwarted the far right in the recent legislative election in France.
The AfD is running second in national polls behind the conservative CDU/CSU alliance, while Scholz’s Social Democrats are in third and their Greens coalition partners fourth.
A new far-left group, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, which also wants to curb immigration and has stronger backing in eastern Germany, is in fifth place ahead of the Free Democrats, the smallest of the three parties in the ruling alliance, in sixth.
In a post on X on Monday, Alice Weidel, a co-leader of the AfD, called for a halt to immigration for at least five years. Wagenknecht said in a separate post on the social media site that “whoever allows uncontrolled migration will get uncontrollable violence.”
As well as membership of a terrorist organization, Issa Al H. is accused of three counts of murder and eight of attempted murder.
According to the federal prosecutor, he was attempting to kill as many what he believed to be “infidels” as possible and specifically targeted the neck and upper body of the victims.
Regional authorities in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, where Solingen is located, have also come under fire after it emerged that the suspect’s asylum request had been rejected and he should have been deported. Germany’s 16 federal states are responsible for enforcing deportation orders.
In early June, Scholz responded to mounting law and order concerns with a pledge to accelerate the process of sending immigrants who commit serious crimes back to their homelands, including Syria and Afghanistan.
A few days earlier, an Afghan-born man went on a rampage with a knife at an election rally in Mannheim and injured six people, including a 29-year-old policeman who later died.
Scholz will meet this week with officials from the state governments to discuss additional measures to tighten asylum and deportation rules, according to people familiar with the planning, who asked not to be identified discussing confidential information.
Scholz’s chief spokesman, Steffen Hebestreit, rejected a proposal from conservative opposition leader Friedrich Merz for a blanket rejection of all asylum seekers coming from Syria and Afghanistan.
Such a move would violate both the German constitution and international law, Hebestreit said at the regular government news conference in Berlin.
Sonja Kock, a spokeswoman for the interior ministry, said that the number of new arrivals to Germany is declining partly because of stricter border controls, while the number of deportations has been going up due to recently agreed stricter rules.
(Updates with AfD, BSW comments starting in 11th paragraph)
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