The perpetrator of the 2020 knife attack in the Manor department store in Lugano will face federal criminal court at the end of the month. The indictment contains new details about the alleged jihadist.
View of the courtroom of the Federal Criminal Court in Bellinzona.
The shock was great. On November 24, 2020, a then 28-year-old woman from Ticino attacked two other women in the household goods department of the Manor department store in Lugano shortly before 2 p.m. She attacked them from behind with a bread knife that she had stolen shortly before. The first of the women attacked was severely injured by the 21 centimeter long blade with a cut in the throat and fell to the ground. The other woman was able to defend herself and, with the help of other customers, overpowered and disarmed the attacker.
On the same day, the Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office (BA) took over the investigation. She assumed a terrorist motive. During the attack, the perpetrator shouted “Allahu akbar” (“God is greatest”) and “Vendicherò il profeta Muhammad” (“I will avenge the Prophet Mohammed”), according to various witnesses. She is said to have converted to Islam a few years earlier.
The attack made waves. Because it happened just three weeks after one Terrorist attack by an IS sympathizer in Vienna, which had claimed four lives and injured more than twenty. The Austrian Chancellor at the time, Sebastian Kurz, condemned the “Islamist Terrorist attack in Lugano».
Almost two years after this event, the Federal Criminal Court in Bellinzona is at the end of August to trial the alleged perpetrator, who was arrested immediately after the attack and taken into custody. Since August 2021, she has been serving an early sentence in the Ticino canton prison. The federal prosecutor accuses the accused of attacking the two women in order to “deliberately and according to plan decapitate them with a knife”. She acted particularly unscrupulously, praised the Islamic State and thus supported the IS “in a different way”.
In love with jihad fighters
The BA has filed charges of multiple attempted murders and violating federal law prohibiting al-Qaeda and Islamic State groups. The defense is likely to argue that there was no explicit connection to extremist terrorist groups for the commission of this act. Lawyer Daniele Iuliucci from Lugano, who is defending the accused, could not be reached for comment.
The Federal Office of Police had already investigated the woman living in Lugano Vezia in 2017 and found out that that she had fallen in love with a jihadist fighter from Syria via social media. “The person then tried to travel to Syria and meet the man. But she was stopped by the Turkish authorities at the Turkish-Syrian border and sent back to Switzerland,” the Federal Office of Police (Fedpol) said shortly after the Lugano attack on Twitter. The woman suffered from mental health problems and was admitted to a psychiatric institution after her return.
In the indictment, which is available to this newspaper, further details are now given. Before the crime, in October and November 2020, she is said to have sent 2,507 messages with mostly pro-Islamic content to another Facebook user in Italian and Arabic, which mentioned, among other things, the carrying out of attacks, including Bomb attacks on synagogues and Christian churches in Switzerland. “I want to serve God until I die,” says one message.
Scheme of “lone wolves”
Only days before the Lugano attack, she then deleted all her correspondence on her smartphone and computer with a special program to cover up the traces. According to the BA, the Lugano attack also aimed to avenge the alleged discrimination against Muslims by French President Emmanuel Macron.
Terrorism experts have recognized the pattern of “lone wolves” in the knife attack in Lugano, i.e. of people who, under the influence of propaganda and as a result of their affinity for radical Islam in combination with psychological instability, act mostly on their own initiative and as lone perpetrators.
Fedpol boss Nicoletta della Valle also suggested this interpretation of the knife attack in Lugano. On the evening of the crime, she explained in a media conference in Bellinzona that this attack was similar to the crime of September 12, 2020 in Morges in the canton of Vaud, when a man was stabbed at a kebab stand. In June of this year, the BA brought charges against the alleged perpetrator, a 28-year-old Swiss-Turkish dual citizen, for murder, attempted murder and violation of the federal law prohibiting the groups al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. The trial will also take place in the Federal Criminal Court.
Allegations of illegal prostitution
But first the Lugano assassin has to answer for herself. The main hearing will take place from August 29th to September 1st. Two reserve days are also planned. The date of the opening of the judgment did not appear on the court’s website. According to the daily newspaper “La Regione”, it is scheduled for September 19. The jury is composed of three judges and is chaired by Fiorenza Bergomi. The customer who was seriously injured in the attack has constituted herself as a private prosecutor. As usual, the federal prosecutor’s office will file its criminal complaint as part of the pleading.
In addition to the crimes mentioned, the accused is accused of repeatedly violating cantonal regulations on the practice of prostitution in Lugano between 2017 and 2020 by working illegally in the sex trade without registering with the authorities. She earned a maximum of 5,000 francs a month with prostitution.