BERLIN (Reuters) - German police said on Tuesday that witness statements suggested the man who took a woman hostage in Cologne on Monday had links to Islamic State but no other evidence to that effect had been discovered so far.

“We derived the link between the suspect and Islamic State from witness statements,” senior Cologne police official Klaus-Stephan Becker told a news conference.

He said police had searched the suspect’s home, where they found large supplies of gasoline and Arabic writing on the walls: “We found Arabic letters on the wall with Muslim references but not Islamist ones, and in particular no references to IS.”