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Young female IS radical attacks people in Swiss shopping mall with a knife

At 2 p.m. on Monday, police say a 28-year-old woman stole a knife in a department store in the center of Lugano, Switzerland, and attacked two women in the name of Islamic State.

Without taking the price tag off the knife, she lunged at two women walking nearby. She stabbed one in the neck and started strangling the other one. According to witnesses, she shouted that she belongs to the Islamic State.

The woman in the mall was eventually disarmed by a group of customers who detained her before the police arrived. The subsequent investigation confirmed that the attack was Islamist-motivated.

Witnesses said they heard screaming and bangs, and then saw the bodies of two women in a pool of blood. The attack took place in the center of Lugano on Dante Square. In Switzerland, despite some coronavirus measures, shops are still open.

Counterintelligence services had registered the attacker, whose name the media is not allowed to publish under Swiss law, as radicalized in 2017. The SDA news agency reported that she was born in Switzerland and converted to Islam as an adult. According to Reuters, she attempted to travel to Syria to meet a radical she met on the internet, however, the Turkish authorities detained her at the border with Syria and returned her to Switzerland.

“It is not common for jihadist women to attack, but it is not an exception. Hamas and Islamic jihadist groups have used female suicide bombers in Israel in the past. Another example is Chechen women who took part in attacks in the Moscow metro or the Dubrovnik theater in 2002,” said Marek Čejka, author of the book “The Quran, the Sword, and the Ballot Box” (KorĂĄn, meč a volebnĂ­ urna).

“Some radicals interpret the so-called defensive jihad in such a way that women can be involved in it, that it is legitimate,” he added.

Swiss police are now investigating whether the terrorist acted alone as a so-called lone wolf or as part of a group. An investigation into a recent terrorist shooting in Vienna, where four people died on Nov. 2, revealed that the Islamist had met several Swiss radicals before the attack. They belonged to a group led by the self-proclaimed emir of Winterthur, who was sentenced to four and a half years in prison in September for recruiting people for the Islamic State terrorist organization.

In Switzerland, this attack is the second such incident in the past quarter of a year. In mid-September, an attacker stabbed a 29-year-old Portuguese man in front of a kebab store in Morges. The police caught him the next day with a knife and a copy of the Quran. Authorities were aware that the attacker had spread jihadist propaganda for the last three years.

“Until a few weeks ago, it seemed that we had no worries other than the coronavirus. But the bloody act in Lugano returned attention to Islamist terrorism,” wrote the Swiss daily Neue ZĂŒrcher Zeitung.

The Swiss Federal Security Service (FBS) reports that about a quarter of the radicals it monitors, who are sworn to Islamic State and similar groups, have converted to Islam in adulthood like the attacker in Lugano. The FBS also said last year that a third of Islamists had a criminal history and that prisons, in particular, were a dangerous space for radicalization.

Other European countries also report alarming statistics. The French Ministry of the Interior estimates that a quarter of the French who went to Syria or Iraq to join the Islamists are converts. There is about one-fifth of them among the Germans. The MI5 British intelligence service then stated in a recent study that the number of converts among British jihadists is “surprisingly high”.

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