German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer has proposed “enhanced controls” along the border with Switzerland after a migrant pushed a boy to his death at Frankfurt’s railway station. The Eritrean refugee, who had received asylum in Switzerland, had shoved an eight-year-old boy and his mother in front of a high-speed train on Monday. The boy’s mother survived and was being treated for shock, media reports said.

The boy’s murder caused a public outcry across Germany, with conservative commentators and right-wing politicians demanding tougher border controls to stop the movement of illegal and criminal immigrants. The 40-year-old suspect was reportedly on the run from Swiss law enforcement. Days ahead of the incident in Frankfurt, the man had threatened a woman with a knife. The suspect was “undergoing psychiatric treatment” in Switzerland, German police claim.

“It has been repeatedly evident that secure borders save lives,” the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party said in a statement. Interior Minister Horst Seehofer “wants controls along the border with Switzerland. That is not enough,” said, AfD chief Alice Weidel, “All borders must be secured to protect citizens. Stop illegal entry. Deport criminal migrants and those legally obliged to leave the country.”

The incident came just a week after a migrant from Kosovo pushed a 34-year-old woman in front of an incoming train in the small German town of Voerde. The mother-of-one died at the scene.

German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle reported Interior Minister’s statement:

Germany’s interior minister has told Der Spiegel magazine that he intends to submit a plan for enhanced covert checks and brief searches of travelers along Germany’s border with Switzerland. Horst Seehofer’s remarks followed Monday’s death at Frankfurt’s main railway station, where a Swiss-resident Eritrean migrant undergoing psychiatric treatment allegedly shoved a boy and his mother in front of a moving train. The mother was able to roll to safety, but the boy was killed. “I will do everything possible to arrange intelligent controls at the border,” Seehofer told Der Spiegel, referring to Germany’s 347-kilometer (215-mile) boundary with the Swiss Alpine republic.

This is not the only deadly incident involving migrant suspects to hit the headlines in Germany in recent days. In the city of Stuttgart, a Syrian national (described as Palestinian in some media reports) brutally murdered a man in the street with a sword on Wednesday.

Days after the boy’s murder in Frankfurt, the German media remains clueless about the nature of the crime. “It is more likely to get hit by lightening than to be a victim of such an insane crime,” German newspaper Die Tageszeitung declared. “And it must be emphasized repeatedly that it was safer (for the eight-year old dead boy) to live in Germany — the crime numbers are at a record low.” (I explained in a June 2018 article for the Gatestone Institute why this claim is misleading.)

German weekly Der Spiegel called it a “random crime.” “[T]here can be no complete protection against [such crimes], no measures that can prevent them,” the magazine mused about a crime committed by someone who entered the country illegally.

The mainstream is apparently more concerned about political implications of the crime. “The crime has horrified the entire country and right-wing populists have sought to instrumentalize it,” Der Spiegel lamented.

The establishment’s worries are not totally unfounded. The AfD is surging in polls ahead of the next month’s regional elections in the eastern part of Germany. The right-wing party is now ahead of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative CDU in the eastern German states, an opinion poll conducted on Sunday shows.

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[Cover image via YouTube]



