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Emergency services after knife attack in November 2021
Photo: Angelika Warmuth / dpa
After just a few minutes, the accused laid his head on the table.
"I don't feel well," Abdalrahman A. previously said in German.
Now the interpreter also translates from Arabic: "I take a lot of medication." The hearing is interrupted after just 15 minutes for a medical examination.
According to the experts Norbert Leygraf and Johannes Fuß, the accused received various medications: a neuroleptic for psychoses, occasionally Tavor and a sleeping pill.
However: "We never had the feeling that he was unfocused and unable to follow us," says Leygraf.
The tiredness does not appear to be "by any means psychotic, but rather goal-oriented," says the expert - although he does not want to anticipate the actual assessment.
Abdalrahman A., a 28-year-old Palestinian born in Damascus, has to answer before the Munich Higher Regional Court.
He is charged with three counts of attempted murder and dangerous bodily harm.
Nightmare in ICE 928
The background to the allegations is a nightmare that some passengers of the ICE 928 had to live through almost exactly a year ago: The slim accused suddenly attacked the victims with an 8.5 centimeter long pocket knife shortly before nine in the morning on the route between Passau and Nuremberg.
The actual attack is not in question, A. makes use of his right to remain silent in court.
However, his defense attorney, Maximilian Bär, emphasized that his client had not acted as part of a terrorist network.
And the defense attorney makes it clear right at the beginning that A. needs breaks in order to be able to follow the negotiation.
As in other such cases, it must be clarified: delusion or plan, mental illness or ideological attitude, incapacitated or not?
The prosecution assumes that the planned act was based on “radical Islamist convictions”, and the investigations were suspended accordingly.
Federal prosecutor Silke Ritzert presented the charges in court.
Attack on "representatives of the democratic form of government"
According to this, A. is said to have decided by May 2021 at the latest, as a contribution to the jihad, »to kill non-Muslim residents and nationals of the Federal Republic of Germany indiscriminately as representatives of the democratic form of government and open society simply because they are not, in his eyes, orthodox Muslims acts«.
The man rejected secular forms of government, "he found his stay in the Federal Republic increasingly unbearable."
An important piece of evidence for the prosecution's version: A. ran past "male passengers of an oriental phenotype" in the ICE high-capacity car and left them unmolested.
The attack hit others: A man dozing in his seat.
A. stabbed him eight times, in the head and shoulder.
The victim suffered various cuts and later required mental health treatment.
A few meters further, A. attacked another passenger.
He was able to raise his arms, but he was still hit with stitches in the head and chest.
A. pushed a third man back with the knife in his hand and injured his hands.
He stabbed a passenger in the next car until he collapsed, covered in blood and couldn't move.
During an unscheduled stop at the Seubersdorf train station in Upper Palatinate, the police arrested the perpetrator, and A. has been in custody in the Straubing prison since then.
series of attacks
The course of events presented in the high-security courtroom on the grounds of the Munich-Stadelheim correctional facility is reminiscent of similar crimes: the assassination attempt in a Würzburg department store, for example, in which three women died.
And, again near Würzburg: a young Afghan attacked passengers on a train with an ax and knife in 2016.
Psychological madness and political extremism often mix in such attacks.
The area of conflict is increasingly preoccupying the police and judiciary.
"A mentally ill perpetrator can seek support in an extremist ideology," Munich chief prosecutor Gabriele Tilmann explained in a SPIEGEL interview a few months ago.
"But extremist thinking can also develop into madness," says the head of the Bavarian Central Office for Combating Extremism and Terrorism (ZET).
more on the subject
Anti-extremism fighter Tilmann on violent attacks: "These are often young men without fixed social ties" An interview by Jan Friedmann
Accumulation of acts of violence by the mentally ill: The judge assessed him as "calm and orderly" - shortly afterwards he struck with a fire basket By Matthias Bartsch
Judgment in the Heilbronn murder trial: "I want the death penalty" by Jan Friedmann
Murder trial in Heilbronn: "It's payback time" by Jan Friedmann
The ZET took over the investigations against A. and then handed them over to the Attorney General.
Reason: The indications of an ideologically motivated act were growing.
During his knife attack, A. had not called out anything that would have indicated an Islamist background.
Paranoid schizophrenia was initially suspected.
But even the treating physicians in psychiatry did not share this impression.
After the ICE attack, A. attacked a nurse in the Regensburg district hospital and devastated his isolation room.
IS videos on mobile
Instead, investigators later found IS videos on his cell phone.
Among other things, it glorifies attacks against non-Muslims.
The accused grew up in Syria, came to Germany in 2014 and last lived in Passau.
There he could have radicalized himself - and/or drifted mentally.
Medical and psychological reports will play an important role in classification.
After the indictment, the presiding judge Jochen Bösl played a video of A's statements before the magistrate.
There A. explained that he had been psychologically tortured in Germany.
"What happened, I did because I was of unsound mind," the interpreter translates.
24 days of negotiations are scheduled until the Christmas break.
Perhaps it will take longer to elucidate the background of the fact.