Nearly two days after a man with a knife killed three people and seriously injured four others at a festival in the German city of Solingen, musical instruments are still on stage and the lights are still on.
“We offered to evict them. But the police say it’s a crime scene,” said Philipp Müller, who helped organize the festival that was supposed to go ahead anyway.
“It’s all pretty dystopian,” he said Sunday, standing next to what’s left of a festival site, now a cordoned-off crime scene. He wants to return the instruments to the musicians, but understands the need to preserve the crime scene.
Muller says he saw the bodies of the dead on Friday night, and also people being resuscitated. “I had those images in my head all day yesterday.”
The city’s 160,000 residents are faced with the challenge of coming to terms with the events following the attack on a market square in the city centre during the Festival of Diversity, which was organised to celebrate Solingen’s 650th anniversary.
The festivities planned for Sunday to honor the city have turned into commemorations.
The dead in the attack were two men, aged 67 and 56, and a 56-year-old woman. Eight people were injured, four of them seriously, according to local police chief Thorsten Fleiss. The attacker apparently chose his victims at random, but appeared to want to target their necks, Fleiss said.
Solingen is known in Germany as the “City of Swords” because of its long history of producing swords and knives of all shapes and sizes, which now seems terribly ironic.
The attack has also sparked political debate in Germany over more knife attacks and stricter gun laws.
On Saturday night, a 26-year-old Syrian suspect turned himself in and confessed to the attack, police said. The suspect, who was found with bloody clothes, is now being investigated for possible links to the terrorist group Islamic State.
The incident has added to the fear and anger in Solingen, a city already plagued by recent tragic events. In March, four people died in a fire and in June, an explosion outside a shop. Many in the city still remember an arson attack in 1993 that killed five women and girls of Turkish descent.
