Six people were injured in an attack aboard a Swiss train on Saturday by a man armed with a knife and flammable fluid, St Gallen cantonal police said.
Three adults, two teenagers and a child aged six were hurt, according to a police statement.
Five were stabbed or burnt, while a sixth suffered smoke inhalation as he came to the aid of the others, the statement said, adding that the assailant, a Swiss citizen, was also injured.
“According to current information, a 27-year-old Swiss man poured out a flammable liquid. He was also armed with at least one knife. The liquid caught fire,” the statement said.
Authorities did not yet know the motive for the attacks but a crime of passion was one possibility, Bruno Metzger of the St Gallen cantonal police said in an interview with online media outlet www.welt.de.
“A terrorism background still seems very, very far-fetched,” Metzger said.
The assailant was in police custody, he said, but none of those injured — including the assailant — was responsive, so they could not be questioned.
The police said a criminal inquiry was under way.
Both a woman and the attacker were in critical condition, according to Swiss broadcaster SRF, citing the St Gallen police.
The assault occurred at 2:20pm as the train neared Salez Station on a trip between Buchs and Sennwald in St Gallen, a canton in the northeast of the Alpine republic, the police statement said.
It was the first attack of its kind in Switzerland in recent memory.
In December last year, a 33-year-old Swiss man broke into his neighbors’ house in Rupperswil and killed four people before setting the house on fire, an incident that shocked the country.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema