Two people injured in terror attack in Switzerland department store
The suspect was known to police and had recently been investigated.
Two women have been injured after allegedly being stabbed in a department store in southern Switzerland in what authorities have called an “alleged terrorist attack”.
A suspect has been arrested, police said, after the women were attacked in the city of Lugano and left with non-life threatening injuries.
Swiss federal police said on their Twitter feed that an attack “presumably of terrorist motivation” took place in in the Italian-speaking city on Tuesday afternoon, adding that federal prosecutors were investigating.
The federal prosecutors’ office said that “an alleged terrorist attack against several people in a department store” had taken place.
Police in the southern Ticino region, which includes Lugano, said a 28-year-old Swiss citizen living in the Lugano area had allegedly attacked two women, wounding one person in the neck with a sharp weapon.
In a statement, the Ticino police said one of the victims sustained serious but not life-threatening injuries, while the other had minor injuries.
Catherine Maret, a spokeswoman for the federal police, said the suspect was “known to police” and had “appeared recently in police investigations with regard to terrorism” — specifically jihadism. She declined to comment further.
She declined to comment on Swiss media reports indicating that the attacker shouted “Allahu Akbar” — or “God is great” — during the incident.