"EVERYONE GRAB A CHAIR, THEN WE GO AFTER HIM"
Welt24.de
https://www.welt.de/politik/deutsch...=socialmedia.socialflow....socialflow_twitter
The 26-year-old was arrested by several courageous men, after his knife rampage with a deadly victim. In Barmbek they are proud and emphasize the origin of the Hamburg heroes.
At the moment when Jamel Chraiet becomes one of the heroes of Hamburg-Barmbek, everything goes very fast. On the morning after the knife-attack the 48-year-old recalls how a woman had screamed that someone was stabbing people in a supermarket. "
Suddenly we saw a man with a long knife, blood-stained. No matter how cool you are at other times, in such a moment you first know nothing. "
The native Tunisian was sitting with countrymen in front of a baker's, a few yards away from the crime scene - they reacted quickly. "We said to one another, everyone grab a chair, then we ran towards him. He was already being chased by people who were shouting to him."
A 50-year-old man was murdered in the attack of the 26-year-old, seven more people were injured, some of them severely. Video images show later, how several men bravely hit their chairs at the man still armed with the knife.
How many people ultimately followed the attacker on his rampage is still unclear. Nevertheless, these are the intrepid ones, and they are the talk of the town this Saturday and not only in Hamburg. Their actions are heroic to many, also because they did not look away.
"I was also trying to talk to him, but he just said something that we could not understand at all," Chraiet recalls as he sits back in the cafe where he and others took up the chase. "If he was in another world? No idea what was going on with him." Everything happened quickly. Only the time until the police were there, seemed "damn long" to him.
"But I would not describe myself as a hero, it is just a normal reaction," Chraiet says. The entire cafe had been full, they simply had to do something.
He was glad, however, that he and his countrymen had also been involved in the chase, emphasizes the man, who has been living in Germany for 27 years and is working at the Hamburger Hochbahn. "So the public can see, there are others who are not like that."
For the man who runs the bakery, the men who showed so much civil courage, are heroes too. Who knows what would have happened "if they had not stopped him," Ahmet Dogan says. He also proudly points out that "they were foreign fellow citizens" who stopped the attacker, who was born in the United Arab Emirates and belonged to the Palestinian community. On Saturday there is no other topic in his shop - as everywhere in the shopping street. The Edeka market, however, remains closed. In front of it, locals from Barmbek have laid flowers and lit candles.
Two elder ladies are brought together for the first time by the bloody act. The two 75-year-olds get to know each other as one of them puts a sunflower on the scene. She had been there during the attack but does not want to talk about it and does not want to give her name, she says. Now she spontaneously joins Ingrid Merten, who lives in a seniors' home nearby and shops almost every day at the supermarket, for a coffee.
Margot Hansen, 78, has also come to the Edeka, where she had done some shopping on the previous day, to commemorate the victims. She's went shopping with a queasy feeling, she says. "That can happen anywhere."
Nearby, two women are talking. They do not want to say their names, and most certainly do not want to talk about anything. One of them is a saleswoman in the Edeka branch, the other one heard the "Allahu akbar" ("Allah is the greatest") from her apartmen. "We've seen people running behind him with chairs. Everything was eerily loud, "she says.
Within one day, life has changed.
"We always felt safe. The horror was somewhere else, but never here in Barmbek." Her neighborhood was very colorful,
"different nationalities lived together well."
Jamel Chraiet wants to finish the shopping list on Saturday, a list that his wife had already sent him the day before via WhatsApp. Through the messenger service he had also received a worried message from his 18-year-old son about half an hour after the knife attack: "Call immediately!" His family was glad that he had come home safely. And he himself? Somewhere in the night he had managed to fall asleep. "But it took a long time. The images won't go out of my head."
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