Palestinian pleads guilty to Hamburg Islamist knife attack

A 26-year-old Palestinian man yesterday admitted to killing a man and wounding six others with a knife in a Hamburg supermarket, an attack that stoked fears of Islamist terrorism in Germany.

Ahmad Alhaw "declares that he takes responsibility for the very serious crimes he committed, and explicitly recognises his guilt regarding all the charges," the defendant's lawyer Christoph Burchard told judges in the high-security courtroom.

Alhaw took a 20-centimetre (eight-inch) knife from the shelves of a supermarket last July, using it to kill one and wound six in the assault. He was arrested after passers-by overpowered him.

Charging him with murder, as well as six counts of attempted murder and grievous bodily harm, prosecutors said he acted with a likely Islamist motive.

He told interrogators that the crime "had some connection with events on the Temple Mount" in Jerusalem, where Israeli authorities had recently imposed access controls for Muslim worshippers, prosecutor Yasemin Tuz told the court.