��������

BERLIN: German federal prosecutors said on Friday that they had taken over an investigation into a suspected Islamist attempt to murder two people in the city of Essen last week.
The suspect, a Kosovar national named only as Erjon S to protect his privacy, is accused of attempting to kill a teacher he was acquainted with in a vocational college on Sept 5 before stabbing a bystander on the street in the back.
The “criminally responsible youth” then allegedly walked to the Old Synagogue in Essen looking for further victims, which he failed to encounter, prosecutors said in a statement.
Both victims were seriously injured in the attack, and the suspect sustained a gunshot wound during his arrest.
“The accused acted out of a radical Islamist conviction directed against Germany’s liberal society,” the statement said, adding that his attack had undermined security in the country.
The federal prosecutor’s office assumes jurisdiction over cases when there is a suspected Islamist or national security component.

JUBA: South Sudan’s opposition has accused the government of trying to enforce “authoritarian control and one-tribe rule” after First Vice President Riek Machar was charged with orchestrating militia attacks and suspended from his role.

Machar’s SPLM-IO party rejected the charges against him and 20 others which included murder, treason and crimes against humanity for their alleged involvement in raids by the White Army militia in the northeast in March.

Machar’s detention under house arrest since March has ignited international fears of a renewal of a devastating 2013-2018 civil war between his ethnic Nuer forces and Dinka fighters loyal to his longtime rival President Salva Kiir.

Kiir and Machar served in a unity government as part of a peace deal that ended that war, but their partnership remained strained and sporadic violence has continued between the two sides.

“The charges are fabricated to abrogate the (peace agreement), sideline Dr. Machar and the SPLM-IO, and entrench total government control,” Machar’s SPLM-IO party said in a statement late on Thursday shortly after the justice ministry announced the charges.

Political analysts say Kiir has long been seeking to replace Machar with his close ally, Second Vice President Benjamin Bol Mel, who was sanctioned by the US over suspicions that he received preferential treatment in securing government contracts.

South Sudanese officials have asked the US to lift those sanctions during recent bilateral discussions, Joseph Szlavik, a lobbyist working for Juba in Washington, told Reuters last month.

Those conversations have also touched on sending more US deportees to South Sudan following the arrival in July of eight men, including seven from third countries, Szlavik said.