The number of knife attacks recorded at train stations in Germany has more than doubled since 2019, and foreign nationals are greatly overrepresented when analysing the ethnicity of suspects.
By Aug. 31 this year, the German Federal Police had already recorded 527 violent crimes in which a knife had been used at German train stations—the equivalent of more than two knife attacks a day on average.
The figures were provided by the federal government following a request by Martin Hess, an MP for the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.
In the latest data available, 788 knife-related crimes have been reported so far this year—an increase of almost 40 percent over last year and double the last comparable pre-lockdown year of 2019.
Of the 788 offences recorded this year, the federal police arrested 589 suspects, of whom 209 were foreign nationals. This means that 35 percent of suspects in knife-related crimes at German train stations are foreign, despite foreign nationals comprising 16 percent of the total population.
The most common nationalities of foreign suspects were Syrians, Poles, Moroccans, and Turks.
In addition to the concerning rise in knife-related attacks in the vicinity of public transport, Germany has experienced a spate of violent attacks in general at train stations, in which, again, foreign national suspects are greatly overrepresented.
One modus operandi appears to be the pushing of victims onto the train tracks, to which 49 people were subjected in 2021, up from the 29 cases recorded in the previous year.
German news outlet Deutsche Welle reported last year that 38 of the 65 known suspects involved in such attacks in recent years were not German nationals, showing a disproportionate correlation with migrant crime.
A similar story is unfolding in neighboring France, where annual figures released by the stats bureau of the French Ministry of the Interior last month showed that 69 percent of violent robberies and sexual assaults on public transport in the Parisian region of Île-de-France were perpetrated by foreign nationals.
