Almost three months after the knife attack on two schoolgirls in the town of Illerkirchberg in the southern German state of Baden-Württemberg, the public prosecutor's office in the city of Ulm filed charges against the alleged perpetrator.

The 27-year-old is accused of committing murder and attempted murder resulting dangerous bodily harm. The suspect is alleged to have attacked the two girls because they coincidentally had crossed his path.

The younger of the two girls was taken to hospital with serious but not life-threatening injuries, while the older of the two succumbed to her injuries. Both the victims had German citizenship.

Police later arrested the suspect -- a 27-year-old Eritrean asylum seeker, who was found with injuries on his body and a knife in his possession -- inside a refugee shelter near the scene of the attack. The man was hospitalized and put under police custody.

Police also detained two other men in connection to this case.

Why were the girls attacked?

The asylum seeker from Eritrea is accused of attacking the 14-year-old girl and her 13-year-old friend on December 5, 2022. The 14-year-old later died in hospital, while the 13-year-old was able to flee the scene wounded. She still had to be treated in hospital for over a week.

News agency dpa reported that the public prosecutor's office named a possible motive for the crime: The suspect was about to go to the foreigners' office that day, where he allegedly had planned to threaten officials to issue him an identity document. That's why he reportedly took the knife with him that morning when he left his home. 

According to the investigation, the two schoolgirls happened to walk past his accommodation at the exact moment when he removed the knife from his backpack and put it into his jacket. The 27-year-old had assumed in that moment that the girls had seen the knife, dpa reported.

According to the prosecutor, the man then spontaneously decided to kill the two girls in order to prevent them from calling the police. He is said to have first greeted them, attacking the 13-year-old first, who was able to escape.

Dpa reported that the suspect then allegedly pushed the 14-year-old to the ground from behind and stabbed her several times.

According to the prosecutor, the man went then back to his apartment, where he inflicted a number of cuts on himself, for which he later received treatment in hospital.

National headlines

According to investigators, the suspect admitted killing the 14-year-old, but said he could not remember the attack on the 13-year-old. Still, the assault made headlines across Germany.

The parents of the two girls, however, called for the crime not to be instrumentalized for public agitation; many politicians abided by their wish, however, there was also some criticism of German asylum policy: Baden-Württemberg's Interior Minister Thomas Strobl spoke out in favor of deporting proven perpetrators of crime.

At a citizens' dialog event in Illerkirchberg in mid-January, the father of the 14-year-old victim said that he and his wife wanted the crime scene to be redesigned in a way that nothing could reminded them of it. He said that his two other children were afraid to walk past it.

The municipality complied with this wish, dpa reported: At the recent municipal council meeting, the body decided to demolish the refugee shelter located there, according to a spokeswoman for the municipality, saying that future long-term plans for the site had included the removals of refugee accommodation anyway.

"The demolition of the buildings is just brought forward in this respect," dpa quoted the spokeswoman as saying.

with dpa, AFP