A 29-year-old man armed with a machete and a knife entered a police station in western Germany, shouted the Arabic phrase “Allahu Akbar” (“God is greatest”) and threatened officers with death, investigators said on Friday.
The man, an Albanian national, was overpowered and no police officers were injured in the incident, which took place at around 2:40 a.m. (00:40 GMT) at the police station in Linz, near the western city of Bonn.
He was overpowered in the station’s locked entrance and taken into custody, police said, with minor injuries from the use of a Taser.
Prosecutors say he is being held on suspicion of attempted murder and is suspected of having extremist Islamic motives.
During a search of an apartment associated with the 29-year-old, a hand-drawn flag of the terrorist group Islamic State was found on the wall, prosecutors said.
“There are several indications that the perpetrator was clearly motivated by radical Islamism,” said Michael Ebling, Minister of the Interior of the state of Rhineland-Palatinate.
Ebling said law enforcement had no prior knowledge of the man before Friday’s attempted attack.
The incident in Linz came a day after a man was shot dead by police in the southern city of Munich in what prosecutors described as an attempted terrorist attack linked to an Islamist group.
