Palestinian man confesses to deadly Hamburg supermarket knife attack

The trial started yesterday morning. From Deutsche Welle and the Daily Mail

A 26-year-old Palestinian man on Friday confessed in front of a German court to killing one person and injuring six others in a knife attack at a supermarket in the northern German city of Hamburg.

The man, identified as Ahmad A. (in Germany, according to German law – elsewhere his full name is given, which is Ahmad Alhaw) made the confession as his trial got underway.

“He admits in all charges that he is expressly guilty,” his lawyer said at the start of the trial.

Prosecutors charged the rejected asylum seeker with murder and six cases of attempted murder and grievous bodily harm, saying he likely acted with an Islamist motive. But investigators did not find evidence that he was part of the “Islamic State” (IS) group.

Ahmad A. told interrogators that the crime “had some connection with events on the Temple Mount” in Jerusalem, where Israeli authorities had recently imposed access controls for Muslim worshipers, prosecutor Yasemin Tuz told the court.

“It was important to him to kill as many German nationals of the Christian faith as possible. He wanted his actions to be viewed in the context of an Islamist attack, and understood as a contribution to jihad worldwide,”

The trial is expected to last until March 2, with the six people injured in the attack invited to attend the hearings from January 26. I don’t know if under the German system those dates remain now that he has confessed.