AFP 
Wednesday July 27, 2022
Defendant Abdirahman J. from Somalia arrives in a courtroom at the start of his trial after killing three people and injuring eleven others with a knife in June 2021 at Barbarossaplatz in Wuerburg, in Veitshoechheim, Germany, April 22, 2022. Defendant pixalised on court request. REUTERS/Heiko Becker
A German court on Tuesday committed a Somali man to a psychiatric hospital, after he knifed three people to death in the southern city of Wuerzburg last year.
Nine other people were injured in the attack in the Bavarian city in June 2021.
The man, who came to Germany as an asylum seeker, was accused of using a long kitchen knife to randomly attack people in a shop before running into the street.
Prosecutors initially considered an Islamist motive for the attack but this was not confirmed in the investigation that followed.
Ahead of the trial, which began in April, two court-ordered experts found the perpetrator suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and was therefore unable to be held criminally responsible for his acts.
So the Wuerzburg district court “ordered the accused to be placed in a psychiatric hospital”, a spokesman said.
Prosecutors said the Somali man, who arrived in Germany in 2015, had recounted hearing voices in his head ordering him to carry out the attack.
Berlin took in more than a million asylum seekers in 2015-2016 at the height of Europe’s migrant crisis.
The influx was deeply divisive in Germany and fuelled the popularity of the far-right AfD party.