Man stabs 20 at opening of Berlin train station

BERLIN, May 27 (Reuters) A knife-wielding man attacked people streaming out of a gala ceremony for Berlin's new central rail station last night, injuring up to 20 before being arrested, police said.

''A crazy man ran down the street stabbing people arbitrarily,'' a policeman at the scene told Reuters. Police said some of the injured were in serious condition.

The attacker was identified as a 17-year old German man from Neukoelln, a southern Berlin district with a large immigrant population. Police said he did not have a far-right background.

The attack occurred a few hundred metres from the showpiece rail station where Chancellor Angela Merkel and Berlin Mayor Klaus Wowereit had given speeches only hours before.

Merkel and other dignitaries had left the ceremony well before the attack took place.

As thousands of people streamed out of the glass-covered, five-storey ''Hauptbahnhof'', police said the young man ''ran amok'' through the crowd. Streets were blocked between the Reichstag parliament building and the Charite hospital, where the attack took place.

The station, which sits near the no-man land where the Berlin Wall once split the city in half, was opened by Merkel in time for the World Cup in two weeks.

The stabbing, which follows a string of pparently racially- motivated attacks on dark-skinned people in eastern Germany, may fuel concerns about security at the month-long soccer tournament.

The 700 million euro (900 million dollar) station, Europe's largest, dwarfs Merkel's nearby Chancellery and the Reichstag.

''Berlin has celebrated a number of great days in the recent past but I think today will go down as one of the most special,'' Merkel said earlier in the evening, after arriving on the first train to the station that left Leipzig just an hour earlier.

More than 1,100 trains and 300,000 passengers are expected to pass through the station each day.

Reuters DH RN0657