In the end the pressure was too great: Because of their handling of the murderous knife attack in Solingen In August 2024, North Rhine-Westphalia’s Family Minister Josefine Paul, who is also responsible for refugees and integration, resigned on Tuesday morning. The reason is an “increasing political polarization in the committee of inquiry surrounding me,” explained the Green Party. After the Solingen attack, in which the Syrian Issa Al Hasan stabbed three people and seriously injured eight others, the black-green NRW state government of CDU Prime Minister Hendrik Wüst promised maximum transparency and set up the investigative committee in the Düsseldorf state parliament itself.
The 43-year-old Minister Paul quickly came under heavy criticism. The opposition from the SPD and FDP accuses the historian, who studied history, political science and sociology in Braunschweig and Münster, of being heavily involved in concealing her political responsibility for the terrorist attack little interested in his clarification to be.
Because the party left, which has led the mammoth Düsseldorf Ministry for Children, Youth, Family, Equality, Flight and Integration since July 2022, was responsible for asylum rights issues and therefore also for deportations. And after the Solingen attack, it quickly became clear that Issa Al Hasan was able to kill in North Rhine-Westphalia because he had not been deported to Eastern Europe in June 2023 as planned – according to the so-called Dublin rules, Bulgaria, where he first entered the EUresponsible for his asylum application.
Nevertheless, the ex-minister, who was born in Helmstedt in Lower Saxony, apparently went into hiding for at least 48 hours after the attack: During a business trip to France, the Green Party did not respond to an SMS message from CDU Interior Minister Herbert Reul or to calls from her party friend, Deputy Prime Minister Mona Neubaur. It was only after two days that it became clear that Al Hasan was a so-called Dublin case and therefore her ministry was responsible, Paul explained.
“Lie to your face for months”
But the opposition has had reasonable doubts about this for months. Paul, who has been married to the Green ex-Justice Minister of Saxony, Katja Meier, since 2025, had “lied to the faces of members of parliament, parliament and the public for months,” criticized the SPD chairwoman of the investigative committee, Lisa Kapteinat, last June.
The fact that the Social Democrat was probably right about this is shown by a text message that, despite the black-green promise of maximum transparency, was not included in the files released by Paul’s former ministry and which therefore only appeared in the investigative committee in mid-January. In the short message, just 24 hours after the attack, Paul asked the head of the department responsible for “escapes” to what extent her ministry could be affected – and just six minutes later she confirmed in detail that Al Hasan was a “Dublin case”. The Greens’ assertions that they only realized after two days that they were politically responsible appear to be demonstrably false.
On Tuesday afternoon, Wüst had Paul’s successor sworn in with the previous co-leader of the Green parliamentary group, Verena Schäffer.