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A woman has been arrested after 17 people were injured in a knife attack in Hamburg on Friday.

A German police spokesman confirmed that officers had arrested a 39-year-old woman in connection with the attack, which happened at Hamburg Central station, and are not seeking other suspects.

Footage posted on social media showed a caucasian woman, wearing a hoodie and tracksuit bottoms, being arrested and led away from the scene by police.

According to Hamburg’s fire brigade, three people sustained life-threatening injuries and three others were seriously hurt. Six suffered minor injuries.

The attack happened during evening rush hour, at around 6.05pm local time, in between platforms 13 and 14 at the railway station.

German media reported that bloodstains could be seen on the ground and that some victims were given medical treatment on trains. Photographs showed one man being treated on the platform, while another showed a man being taken away on a stretcher.

Traffic at the station had been suspended on Friday evening, with a cordon set up around the scene of the attack.


The motivation behind the attack is currently unclear. Germany suffered a series of knife and car-ramming terror attacks in the run-up to the February federal elections.

In March, two people were killed after a man with mental illness crashed his car into a crowd of people in the western city of Mannheim. Several others were injured.

The previous month, in Munich, a rejected Afghan asylum seeker had driven his car into a trade union demonstration in central Munich the day before the annual Munich Security Conference.

Germany also suffered a serious knife attack in January in Aschaffenburg, Bavaria, where an Afghan asylum seeker stabbed a two-year-old to death in a park.

In December, a Saudi man drove his car at crowds at a Christmas market in the central city of Magdeburg, having driven through a gap in the security barriers. Six people were killed and nearly 300 injured.

Last August, in the western German city of Solingen, a Syrian asylum seeker stabbed three people to death and injured eight others during a festival celebrating diversity.

While the nationality of the suspect in Hamburg was not immediately clear, tensions have risen in Germany over the surge in attacks committed by foreigners.

The far-Right, anti-migrant Alternative for Germany party secured an unprecedented 20 per cent of the vote after February’s federal elections, making it the de facto opposition in parliament.