Man stabs 26 after opening of Berlin train station

BERLIN, May 27 (Reuters) A knife-wielding German teenager attacked people leaving a gala ceremony to dedicate Berlin's new central rail station shortly before midnight yesterday, injuring 26 before being arrested, police said.

''A crazy man ran down the street stabbing people arbitrarily,'' a policeman at the scene told Reuters.

A police spokesman said today six of the injured were in serious condition.

The attacker was a 16-year old German from Neukoelln, a south Berlin district with a large immigrant population. Police said they were still investigating the motives of the attack by the youth who has a police record for assault.

They said they were unsure what was behind the violence but ruled out a far-right link. They also said the teenager had acted on his own.

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 before the attack took place. A free concert and light show outside the new station attracted more than a 100,000 people to the area.

As thousands streamed away from the glass-covered, five-storey ''Hauptbahnhof'' after the show, police said the young man ''ran amok'' through the crowd on a street about three blocks to the east of the station.

The attack took place along a long stretch of crowded sidewalks in the government quarter between the Reichstag parliament building and the Charite hospital.

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 apparently 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 (0 million) 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 DKS BD1144