Frankfurt: 8-year old boy murdered by Eritrean who pushed him in front of train

[Middle-aged Europe]

The recent pattern of senseless train-pushings is indeed peculiar. Copycats?

The apparent lack of any motive make the incidents somehow reminiscent of killing sprees and shooting rampages.

Why only immigrants though? There seems to be no reason for that either except maybe that newly arrived immirgants have a higher likelihood of being economically disenfranchised and socially isolated, both of which would also fit the profile of a random spree-killer.

[Middle-aged Europe]

The perpetrator from Frankfurt has been living in Switzerland since 2006. He's married with three children. Apparently, he travelled from Basel to Frankfurt only a couple of days ago.  He has no police record in Germany.

And yesterday he suddenly snapped and pushed a child and his mother in front of a train.

[Middle-aged Europe]

The perpetrator came to Switzerland in 2006 and was granted asylum in 2008. He was employed, had an unrestricted residence permit, and until this year or so a clean criminal record.

Recently, he started to be involved in a series of "incidents" though which culminated in threatening his neighbour with a knife last week. As a result, Swiss authorities issued a search warrant for him. So far, he has not provided any motive for his crime.

Sounds increasingly like mental issues, I suppose...

[Middle-aged Europe]

It is reported that the perpetrator from Frankfurt - named Habte Araya - is suffering from paranoid delusions, specifically that he was under the impression that other passengers on the train were capable of reading his mind.

[Middle-aged Europe]

Interesting note of contrast between the two big mediatised murders involving immigration and Switzerland this year.

In March, a 75 year old Swiss woman stabs a 7 year Kosovan child. Atlas thread, which doesn't mention the nationality of either the perpetrator or the victim, gets one reply- and the political and media response is to emphasise the woman's financial and psychiatric issues, and downplay the alleged racial motive.

In July, an Eritrean refugee murders an 8 year old child; and the focus is entirely on the perpetrator's nationality, with his own psychiatric issues being downplayed.

This is a interesting point. Today there was a equally horrible killing in Dortmund: A Afghan refugee killed his wife, also Afghan, with some 70 stabs with a knife and then hid her body in a suitcase.
There was almost no media coverage about this, except in the local paper, i just happened to stumble upon it. Almost none of the serious Major newspapers covered it. Quite the contrast to the multiple day front page coverage+press conference of the Interior Minister that the Frankfurt killing got.
There seems to be a tendency here to downplay immigrant-on-immigrant crimes, just like native-on-immigrant crimes, possibly due to a thinking that they "are all backward and they wont change" and because the majority society deems them irrelevant as long as the victims are not part of the majority society themselves, similar to how terrorist attacks in the middle east are barely covered, unlike ones in the west.

That's certainly true.

To be honest, one thought that had crossed my mind in relation to the incident in Frankfurt - and specifically the AfD's reaction to it - was: Thank god Andreas Lubitz wasn't black.

[Middle-aged Europe]

Horst Seehofer has announced a strengthening of border controls at the Swiss-German border. Most useless government decision ever. Is he expecting a sudden invasion of mentally disturbed Africans from Zürich now? And why only Switzerland? Because mental healthcare is significantly better in France (Switzerland ist just like France a member of the Schengen Area)?

Classic Seehofer. Wanting to look tough by choosing style over substance.