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| - German police on Thursday said they could not have prevented a suspected Islamist knife attack in Dresden, despite the suspect being a known extremist with a string of previous convictions. Prosecutors are investigating the stabbing, which killed one tourist and seriously injured another on October 4, as a terrorist attack. The suspect, a 20-year-old Syrian man, has a history of involvement with the Islamist scene. He has been convicted of crimes including supporting a foreign terrorist organisation, obtaining instructions to commit a serious act of violence endangering the state, and bodily injury. He had been under surveillance after only recently being released from a juvenile detention centre, on September 29. "It is the bitter truth: we could not have prevented this act," said Dirk-Martin Christian, the head of intelligence services in the state of Saxony. Petric Kleine, head of the region's judicial police, added: "From our point of view, we exhausted all the measures at our disposal." The suspect came to Germany in 2015, along with tens of thousands of Syrian migrants, and had become increasingly radicalised since 2017, when police classified him as dangerous. His refugee status was revoked in 2019 and an expulsion order was issued against him, but Germany has put deportations to Syria on hold since the start of the country's civil war. The interior ministers of Bavaria and Saxony on Thursday called for an end to the ban. "The federal government, ... must finally create the conditions to enable repatriations to Syria," Bavaria's Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann told Die Welt daily. The far right has often accused Chancellor Angela Merkel of having contributed to the Islamist threat in Germany by opening the country's borders to hundreds of thousands of migrants in 2015. The two tourists attacked on October 4 had travelled to Dresden together from the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia. One of them, a 55-year-old man, died from his injuries in hospital. The other, aged 53, survived with serious injuries. fec/dlc/har
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