The lone wolves of Germany

Why weak states resort to collective punishment of citizens

It happened again last week. With depressing repetitiveness, German citizens were terrorised and murdered in their streets by a man who should never have been there. Farhad Noori had arrived from Afghanistan in 2016 as a teenager; his application for asylum rejected, he did what Germany’s system allows him to do and appealed. The case dragged on for three years, and while he was known to police for drug and theft offences, was granted something which might is being translated as a ‘tolerance’ permit, meaning that his deportation was suspended.

Noori worked as a security guard and bodybuilder, gaining 68,000 followers on Instagram by showing off his muscles. And then he decided to drive a Mini Cooper into a demonstration in Munich organised by the trade union Verdi, which only a few weeks earlier criticised the German Right for wanting to change the country’s asylum policies. A two-year-old girl and her 37-year-old mother were killed.