The news

German police have arrested a Syrian man suspected of killing three people in the attack on Friday. Authorities said the Islamic State claimed responsibility for the terrorist act.

Leading politicians from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) used the nationality of the alleged attacker to protest against the country’s immigration and asylum policies. One AfD official even called for an end to “forced multiculturalism”.

SIGNALS

Stabbing could boost AfD election victory

Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s center-left party has so far resisted calls from the conservative opposition to immediately ban the admission of refugees from Syria and Afghanistan, DW reported. But the stabbing could give the far-right AfD ammunition ahead of the Sept. 1 election in Thuringia, where AfD leader Björn Höcke – who once said it was problematic to portray Adolf Hitler as “absolutely evil” – is leading in the polls. The AfD was “emboldened” after its opponents repeated the group’s hardline stance on immigration at the party’s recent protests over the killing of a police officer, the New York Times wrote in July, showing how that sentiment has increasingly moved to the center of German political discourse.

Experts say knife crime statistics are not necessarily reliable

The federal government has been accused of “talking a lot but doing little” while the coalition government stalls over a bill that would ban the carrying of knives longer than six centimeters, Le Monde reports. But experts doubt official statistics that appear to show a 9.7 percent increase in cases of aggravated assault with knives compared to last year: The figures “include both actual knife attacks and knife threats, so it’s a very vague category,” a criminologist told DW. “And it was only recently, so the numbers are not really reliable.” He also questioned the link between violent crime and immigration, arguing that the non-Germans disproportionately represented in the statistics ultimately come from a wide variety of backgrounds.