A man stabbed passersby at random at a festival marking a German city's 650th anniversary on Friday night, leaving three people dead and four seriously wounded. Police launched a manhunt for the attacker, Deutsche Welle reports. The stabbings took place in the central square of Solingen, a city of 160,000 in western Germany near Düsseldorf. Before police released the death toll, one of the organizers of the festival announced from the stage that emergency workers were fighting for the lives of nine people, per the AP.
A local newspaper, the Solinger Tageblatt, reported that many of the attendees didn't know of the attack until organizers told the crowd at 10pm that the event was canceled. They asked festivalgoers to leave the area calmly, per the BBC. Emergency crews were treating the wounded, and helicopters involved in the manhunt hovered overhead. One witness told the Tageblatt that he realized something was wrong when a singer onstage had a strange expression. "And then a person fell over just a meter away from me," Lars Breitzke said, as translated by the BBC.
The Festival of Diversity, which began Friday and was scheduled to run through Sunday, included several stages in central streets offering attractions such as live music, cabaret, and acrobatics, per the AP. "We all wanted to celebrate our city's anniversary together and now have dead and wounded to lament," Mayor Tim Kurzbach posted on Facebook. "It breaks my heart." (More stabbing attack stories.)