The man arrested for stabbing a Spanish tourist at Berlin’s Holocaust memorial is a 19-year-old Syrian refugee, according to prosecutors.
They said it appeared he’d been planning to kill Jewish people for several weeks and was apparently motivated by the Middle East conflict.
The attack happened about 6pm on Friday and he was arrested nearby about three hours later.
His hands and trousers were smeared with blood and the suspected weapon was in his backpack. He was also carrying a Koran and a prayer rug, prosecutors added.
The suspect is said to have arrived in Germany as an unaccompanied minor in 2023, had no criminal record and was unknown to police.
The 30-year-old Spanish man who was stabbed needed emergency surgery after being wounded in the head and neck.
Prosecutors said he was in an induced coma but his life was no longer at risk.
The stabbing comes a day before Germany’s national election in which the far-right and anti-immigration AfD is expected to come second.
Campaigning has been overshadowed by a number of attacks by migrants – which appear to have bolstered the party’s support.
A woman and her two-year-old daughter died when a car drove into a crowd in Munich this month. A 24-year-old Afghan asylum seeker was arrested.
Another Afghan national was arrested over the stabbing deaths of a toddler and a 41-year-old man in the Bavarian city of Aschaffenburg last month.
In December, a Saudi man, who had lived in Germany for years, killed six people when he drove his car into people at a Christmas market in Magdeburg.
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More than one million migrants arrived in the country from 2015-2016, mostly from Syria, but also from Afghanistan and Iraq, many of them fleeing war and political instability.
Prosecutors said they had no evidence the suspect in the Berlin stabbing is linked to any of the other attacks, or to any extremist organisations.
He was scheduled to appear before an investigating judge on Saturday.
