An 18-year-old college student accused of carrying out a string of Islamist knife attacks went on trial in Germany on Monday.
Prosecutors have charged the Kosovar teenager with three counts of attempted murder over the incidents in the western city of Essen last year.
The suspect, who was 17 years old at the time, is accused of having stabbed his 45-year-old teacher at a vocational college, seriously injuring her.
Prosecutors believe the teenager was driven by “an Islamist-jihadist ideology.”
They say he took a decision in early September 2025 to “go on a jihad himself against supposed infidels.”
On September 5, he armed himself with a knife and headed to a primary school in Essen, a former industrial hub north-east of Dusseldorf, where he attacked a janitor he knew personally, according to prosecutors.
The man fought him off, preventing him from using the knife.
He then proceeded to attack the teacher at the vocational college, stabbing the 45-year-old several times in the upper body, severely injuring the woman.
He fled the scene and then stabbed a homeless man in the back on the street before being shot and severely wounded by police near the city’s main train station.
All three victims survived, but the teacher is still unwell, her representative in a civil action suit said.
According to prosecutors, after those attacks the suspect had twice tried to find victims near Essen’s Old Synagogue “without, from his perspective, finding suitable persons to target.”
The Old Synagogue is operated by Essen as the House of Jewish Culture and used for exhibitions and events. Religious services are not held there. The current building is a reconstruction, erected in the 1980s, of the synagogue destroyed by the Nazis during the Kristallnacht pogrom on November 9, 1938.
The suspect, who also faces charges of assault, grievous bodily harm, resisting a public official and coercion, is in pre-trial detention.
The proceedings are being held at the Dusseldorf Higher Regional Court under heavy security measures.
Before the charges were read out, the public was excluded from the remainder of the trial, including the handing down of the verdict because the defendant was a minor at the time of the offence, the presiding judge said.
The defendant’s defence lawyer declined to comment on the charges before the trial began.
The court has scheduled 13 trial dates until September 9.