A young woman was attacked and severely injured by an unknown person in the night of December 28 in the Berlin district of Siemensstadt, with a knife. The victim survived, but had to be operated on in an emergency. The motives are unknown, and the perpetrator is still being sought.
The attack, according to the police statement and preliminary investigations, occurred in the early morning of December 28, when a 26-year-old woman was attacked at around 3:30 am as she left a multi-family house on Spandauer Rohrdammweg. A “summoned acquaintance” then brought the victim to a nearby hospital after the “heavily bleeding” woman was able to alert the acquaintance on the street, as reported by the B.Z.
According to the police statement, the woman suffered multiple stab wounds to the upper body and underwent emergency surgery.
The police initially made no statements on possible motives, only to later refer in the statement to the ongoing investigation into the suspicion of dangerous bodily harm.
On the website “Messerinzidenz”, a “tracker for crimes with knives” across the federal territory, a total of around 272 incidents involving stabbing weapons or similar objects have been listed for the month of December alone, according to researched and archived police and press releases in Germany.
Last year, a total of 3,482 crimes involving knives were registered in the capital, with about half being threats. Berlin’s Police President, Barbara Slowik Meisel, explained to the B.Z. on December 27:
“This differentiation does not make it better overall. But it is a difference whether someone is actually injured or only threatened.”
According to Slowik, the numbers for the year 2024 would have been similar, and she added that “we already had the second-highest level of the last ten years last year.” The article quotes her as saying:
“I don’t want to downplay shootings, but knives are very underestimated, especially by many young people who take a knife with them and then use it spontaneously in a dispute, often with very serious consequences.