German police say Syrian suspect confesses to knife rampage

German police said on Sunday that a Syrian man has given himself up and confessed to killing three people and wounding eight others in a knife rampage at a street festival.

Friday's random attack amid thousands of people gathered for the festival in the western city of Solingen stunned Germany.

Two men aged 56 and 67 and a 56-year-old woman were killed, officials said. Four of the wounded remained in serious condition. All of the victims were stabbed in the neck, according to police.

Police said in a statement that the suspect was a 26-year-old Syrian who had "given himself up to authorities in charge of the investigation and declared himself responsible for the attack".

Officers arrested a suspect in a raid at a hostel for asylum seekers on Saturday, not far from the scene of the attack, a police spokesman told AFP.

North Rhine-Westphalia state interior minister Herbert Reul said police had evidence linking the man to the knife attacks.

According to the Bild and Spiegel newspapers, the suspect arrived in Germany in December 2022 and had a protected immigration status often given to those fleeing war-torn Syria.

He was not known to the security services as an extremist, the newspapers reported.

Police have also arrested a 15-year-old suspected of failing to report a criminal act. Witnesses had allegedly seen the teen discussing the attack, said Markus Caspers, prosecutor of Duesseldorf, just west of Solingen.

The attack late on Friday took place as thousands of people gathered for the first night of a ;Festival of Diversity;, part of a series of events to mark Solingen's 650th anniversary.

Germany has been on high alert for extremist attacks since the Gaza war erupted on October 7 with the Hamas attacks on Israel.

German street festivals and markets have previously been hit.

A truck rampage at a Berlin Christmas market in 2016 killed 12 people. In May, a police officer was killed and five people were wounded in a knife attack at a far-right rally in Mannheim, with an Islamist motive suspected.

The Daesh group's Amaq propaganda arm said "the perpetrator of the attack on a gathering of Christians" in Solingen "was a soldier of Daesh".

Daesh said the attack was carried out as "revenge for Muslims in Palestine and everywhere", in an apparent reference to the Gaza conflict.

The claim could not be immediately verified, though German officials had said "a terrorist motive cannot be excluded".

Interior Minister Nancy Faeser had warned this month that Germany was in "the firing line" of radical groups.

National and local leaders, including Chancellor Olaf Scholz, said the country had been "deeply shocked" by the Solingen deaths.