On May 23, a mentally ill woman attacked passengers waiting on the platform at Hamburg Central Station. She managed to injure 18 people before Abu-Bakar-Siddik Agayev, a Chechen national, knocked the knife out of her hands.
Agayev, 21, has lived in Germany since October 2024. He told Chechnya Segodnya that he came to the station on May 23 to see his cousin off. "Suddenly, we noticed a woman with a knife; she looked strange. Then I heard a scream, which distracted me, and when I turned around again, the woman was already running toward us, stabbing everyone in her path. When she reached us, I managed to dodge, and she chased after my cousin."
Agayev ran after her, tripped her, knocked her to the ground, and held her until a police patrol arrived. He was assisted by Muhammad al-Muhammad, a 19-year-old Syrian refugee from Aleppo. He also held the woman down, calming her down in German.
"She offered almost no resistance; there was no terrible aggression. It was clear she had mental health issues," Agayev explained.
Police later reported that the attacker, 39-year-old Lydia S., a homeless German woman from Lower Saxony, suffers from paranoid schizophrenia, which is characterized by hallucinations and delusions. The day before the incident at the Hamburg train station, she had been discharged from a psychiatric clinic in Bremerhaven. Police have a lengthy file on Lydia S. In February, she attacked and injured a five-year-old girl at Hamburg Airport. In March, she had a confrontation with staff at a psychiatric hospital. Her aggressive behavior prompted several calls to the police in various German states.
At the Hamburg train station, she injured 18 people, aged between 19 and 85: seven were seriously injured, and four were in critical condition. By court order, the woman was again sent to a psychiatric hospital for treatment. An investigation is underway into the doctors who discharged the homeless woman, who is unsupervised and fails to ensure she takes the medications she needs on time.
Hamburg police and authorities expressed gratitude to the young men, whose courage and determination helped prevent further casualties. This, however, did not prevent some German politicians from once again expressing concern about the excessive number of migrants. They allegedly take up too much of the police's time, which is unable to keep track of people like Lydia S.
