A 29-year-old man armed with a machete and a knife visited a police station in western Germany, yelled the Arabic-language phrase “Allahu Akbar” (“God is greatest”) and threatened to kill officers, investigators said on Friday.
The man, who has Albanian citizenship, was overpowered and no police officers were injured in the incident that took place around 2:40 am (0040 GMT) in the police station in Linz, near the western city of Bonn.
He was subdued in the sealed-off entrance of the station and taken into custody, police said. He was slightly injured by the use of a Taser.
Prosecutors said he was being held on suspicion of attempted murder and that the man is suspected of an Islamic extremist motive.
During a search of an apartment linked to the 29-year-old, a hand-drawn flag of the Islamic State terrorist group was found on the wall, prosecutors said.
“There is more than one indication that the perpetrator was obviously motivated by radical Islamism,” Michael Ebling, the interior minister of the state of Rhineland-Palatinate, said.
Ebling said law enforcement authorities had no previous knowledge of the man before Friday’s attempted attack.
The incident in Linz came the day after a man was shot dead by police in the southern city of Munich during what prosecutors described as an attempted terrorist attack linked to an Islamist group.
