German authorities suspect that two American soldiers killed a man on Saturday night after an altercation at a fair in Wittlich in the west of the country, police said on Sunday.
“After the murder of a 28-year-old man, two suspects were arrested (…). These are American soldiers,” said the police authorities of Trier (West) in a press release.
In the night from Saturday to Sunday, there was an argument between several people at the fair in the small town of Wittlich in Rhineland-Palatinate between Trier and Koblenz.
During the fight, “a 28-year-old man was stabbed” and “four people, two men and two women, fled the scene,” police said, citing witnesses.
Among the quickly identified members of the fugitive group, “suspicions grew about the two men, aged 25 and 26,” whom police arrested and handed over to American authorities. They would take care of the file “in accordance with the statutes of NATO,” she explained.
“We’ve never experienced that here before,” said the mayor of Wittlich, Joachim Rodenkirch, on Sunday when asked by the local press.
The American military presence in Germany has been a mainstay of NATO defense since World War II. Since the end of the Cold War, however, it has declined, from around 200,000 soldiers in 1990 to 34,500 today.
Former US President Donald Trump, who criticized Germany for not contributing enough to the NATO budget and not funding its own defense, decided in July 2020 without consultation to station around 12,000 troops outside of Germany. This project was eventually abandoned by his successor, Joe Biden.