Doubt cast on German train attacker’s nationality

The Islamic State group released a video on Tuesday purportedly featuring the 17-year-old, who was shot dead by police following the train attack in which he injured five people, two of them critically. However, sources close to the German security services now think he might have pretended to be Afghan on arrival in Germany in 2015 in order to have a better chance at securing asylum, television station ZDF reported. 

In the IS video the youth uses phrases of a dialect of Pashto spoken in Pakistan and not Afghanistan and experts have indicated that his accent is also clearly Pakistani, ZDF said. A Pakistani document was also found in his room. The name he used in the video, “Mohammed Riyadh”, does not match the name under which he registered in Germany, Riaz Kahn, the station added. German authorities said they had authenticated the video. On Tuesday, authorities said they had found a hand-painted IS flag and what they called a suicide letter among the attacker’s belongings. 

“The perpetrator of the stabbing attack in Germany was one of the fighters of the Islamic State,” the IS-linked Amaq news agency said. Meanwhile, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier called for greater cooperation between police and intelligence agencies in Europe as well as sustained international efforts to fight Islamic State after recent attacks.

The minister also said Germany would pledge a further 176 million dollars to help stabilise Iraq at a donor conference of 24 countries in Washington. “The attacks of the past have shown us there is no absolute security,” Steinmeier said.