German police have arrested a man suspected in a stabbing attack at Berlin’s Holocaust memorial that left a Spanish tourist seriously injured.
There was no immediate indication of a motive for the attack late on Friday, two days before Germans vote in a national election.
A police spokesperson, Florian Nath, toldsaid the attack happened at 6pm, “probably with a knife. Maybe with something else.”
Nearly three hours later, a male suspect approached an officer in the cordon around the memorial grounds. “He had blood on his hands and this made him very suspicious,” Nath said.
The spokesperson said police arrested the man and seized the attack weapon.
The victim was identified as a 30-year-old Spanish man, who was taken to a hospital.
The monument, one of the German capital’s most sacred sites, commemorates the 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis during the second world war.
The national election campaign, in which polls suggest a far-right party could come in second place for the first time in 90 years, has been marred by a series of high-profile attacks. One of those was a stabbing blamed on an Afghan immigrant, which prompted a fraught debate on immigration.
Earlier on Friday, an 18-year-old ethnic Chechen was arrested on suspicion of planning an attack on the Israeli embassy in Berlin, Bild reported.