Moroccan who admitted stabbing two in Finland was refused asylum
Helsinki — A teenage Moroccan asylum seeker, who admitted on Tuesday that he had killed two women and injured eight other people in a knife attack in the Finnish town of Turku, had his application for asylum rejected before the attack, authorities said. Although he confessed to the killings in a closed-door court hearing, 18-year-old Abderrahman Mechkah did not admit any terrorist motive, lawyer Kaarle Gummerus said. "[My client] admits manslaughter and injuries ... But what the investigator has brought up thus far may not be enough to classify this as a terrorist crime," Gummerus told Reuters. Mechkah, who had been living in a Red Cross immigrant reception centre in Turku since coming to Finland in spring 2016, had been appealing against the result of his asylum application at the time of the knife attack last Friday. "He has received the result of his asylum application and he has appealed it. He is still in the [asylum] process," said a spokesperson from the Finnish National Bure...
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