A 33-year-old Iraqi asylum seeker, who describes himself as “Iraqi Hitler” is on trial for terrorising other migrants in an asylum home including threatening an eight-year-old girl with a knife.

The mother of the eight-year-old, who came from the Kurdish region of Iraq, described the 33-year-old as a “sick person who should not be accommodated with families”. Police say that the Iraqi had terrorised asylum home residents in the city of Weiden for weeks and at least 50 residents cheered when he was finally arrested, Onetz reports.

“Every day there were problems with him, every day came the police,” a witness told the court.

Police told the court of their prior run-ins with the 33-year-old including an incident in the summer of 2017 when they were called to the asylum home and he jumped on the roof of their police vehicle, beat his chest and shouted: “I’m Hitler, I’m the boss, you’re all women!”

The Iraqi would often refer to himself as the “Iraqi Hitler” and would shout the phrase “I am the Iraqi Hitler” and would not hesitate to threaten others, including police. One 20-year-old police officer said that the man threatened to hurt him and said: “I see you in town, then I have knives and many men, make you dead.”

Jihadists Exploit Mental Illness For Attacks: Experts https://t.co/VdYcdauquG pic.twitter.com/mQsgXWir0Z — Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) May 13, 2016

One officer expressed concern about the man’s behaviour, recalling an incident last year in which a mentally unstable Afghan migrant had stabbed a five-year-old child to death in an asylum home in the town of Arnschwang. The man was later shot by police who arrived on the scene a short time later.

Cases of mental illness among asylum seekers have been on the rise according to a report from the summer of last year. Some studies have estimated that cases of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are up to 10 times higher among asylum seekers than the general German population.

An Italian study showed that asylum seekers in the northern city of Padua were prone to “aggressive behaviour” and “psychotic episodes” due to their mental illnesses.