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An 18-year-old college student accused of carrying out a string of Islamist knife attacks went on trial in Germany on Monday.<\/p>\n
Prosecutors have charged the Kosovar teenager with three counts of attempted murder over the incidents in the western city of Essen last year.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Prosecutors believe the teenager was driven by “an Islamist-jihadist ideology.”<\/p>\n
They say he took a decision in early September 2025 to “go on a jihad himself against supposed infidels.”<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The man fought him off, preventing him from using the knife.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s main train station.<\/p>\n
All three victims survived, but the teacher is still unwell, her representative in a civil action suit said.<\/p>\n
According to prosecutors, after those attacks the suspect had twice tried to find victims near Essen\u2019s Old Synagogue “without, from his perspective, finding suitable persons to target.”<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The suspect, who also faces charges of assault, grievous bodily harm, resisting a public official and coercion, is in pre-trial detention.<\/p>\n
The proceedings are being held at the Dusseldorf Higher Regional Court under heavy security measures.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The defendant’s defence lawyer declined to comment on the charges before the trial began.<\/p>\n
The court has scheduled 13 trial dates until September 9.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n