A 25-year-old man was arrested on Sunday morning in Schaffhausen, after he allegedly attacked two children at random in the street, who were returning from a playground. The attacker allegedly hit them, including kicking them, causing the intervention of a witness who would have made him flee. The injured children had to be taken to hospital by ambulance, while the individual was arrested shortly after at a gas station. During his arrest, a neighbor said that the man shouted “Jesus is here, Jesus is back”, according to witnesses.
This attack brings to three in two months the number of random attacks on children in the street in Switzerland. At the beginning of October, a 23-year-old Chinese student stabbed several five-year-old children who were going to daycare in Zurich – three were injured, one seriously. In mid-November, a 10-year-old child was seriously injured by a 52-year-old man in Samnau (GR), while he was waiting at a bus stop. In March, in Urdorf (ZH), a 26-year-old under the influence of drugs attacked a 12-year-old so seriously that the latter remained in a coma for several days. Not to mention the attack in Annecy last June, when a man injured six people, including four young children, with a knife.
When questioned, the forensic doctor Thomas Knecht evokes a possible copying effect. “There are copycats in all forms of crime. People memorize behaviors. In cases of attacks against children, they have noted several times this year that such acts cause a lot of horror and fear.” For the specialist, this is precisely what these clearly destabilized people would be looking for. “They act for their own benefit, put themselves in the spotlight and have an immense need to destroy.” This impulse pushes them toward anyone nearby, and the fact that they are children doesn’t hold them back. “In the state of emergency in which all these authors found themselves, the inhibition mechanisms no longer exist. The adrenaline rush and the desire to be aggressive take over everything.”
But for violence expert Dirk Baier, we are seeing more of a random accumulation than a real trend. “Each of these acts is unique in its origins. The common denominator is probably that all the perpetrators were psychologically unstable, and male.” He attributes these outbreaks of violence to psychoses or drugs, although “a single characteristic is never enough for such acts to occur. It is always an unfortunate combination of factors that causes such violence.”
