Convicted of attempted murder for stabbing Jewish man by synagogue, Swiss teen avoids jail

Court also finds the radicalized youth intended to kill more people inside house of worship; his age left his sentence capped at 1 year in prison — which was then commuted

ZURICH, Switzerland — A teenager who stabbed a Jewish man in March 2024 in Zurich was sentenced on Tuesday to one year in prison — the maximum for someone of his age — but his punishment was commuted to compulsory mental care.

Aged 15 at the time of the incident, he had stabbed a 50-year-old man 17 times in the street near a synagogue. The man survived his injuries but was seriously wounded.

The district court near Zurich convicted him of “attempted murder,” emphasizing that it had deemed his act to be “particularly unscrupulous.”

The teenager, who had become radicalized online, was also found guilty of “supporting a criminal and terrorist organization,” “repeatedly disseminating depictions of violence” and “repeatedly” inciting hatred or discrimination based “on ethnic origin or religion,” the statement said.

The court also determined that he had intended to kill more people, but after finding the door to a synagogue shut, he instead attacked a man in the street who was easily identifiable as Jewish.

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The teenager, who is of Tunisian descent and became a naturalized citizen in 2011, announced his plans to kill Jews at a synagogue in a video posted on social media and claimed responsibility for the attack on behalf of the jihadist group Islamic State (IS).

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