by Stefano Piazza
Farhad Noor, known for being a muscular internet star, drove his car into a group of demonstrators in Munich. He injured 30 people, including a child. What’s even more shocking is that before committing this horrible act, he had posted a religious speech on the internet.
Having arrived in Germany at a very young age, he was classified as an “unaccompanied minor” according to the bureaucracy. His personal odyssey had begun in Afghanistan and, passing through Italy – the classic point of entry into Europe – had taken him as far as Reggio Calabria, where he was fingerprinted when he was only 15 years old. According to the Dublin Regulation, he should have applied for asylum there, but after a brief stay in Brescia, all traces of Farhad Noor were lost.
On February 13th, at the age of 24, his name came back to the fore for the umpteenth attack in Germany. After disappearing from the radar of the Italian authorities, he reappeared in Munich in 2016, where he had applied for asylum. His request was rejected, but since in the meantime he had started attending school, he seemed to be on the right path to integration.
Despite the refusal, the Munich authorities had granted him a regular residence permit. Farhad had complied with the law and found work as a “shop detective”, the term used in Germany for security guards who monitor theft in supermarkets. This led to a big media misunderstanding when, after the attack on Seidlitzstrasse, many German journalists sought information about him: his name appeared in the archives of several proceedings for shoplifting, but not as a defendant, but as a witness.
On social media, Farhad showed another of his passions: bodybuilding. He posted photos of himself training with weights and doing challenging exercises, and his TikTok and X profiles, now deleted, had tens of thousands of followers. Last May he had participated in the German junior bodybuilding championship and in October he had placed fifth in a competition called “Men’s Physique”. An entrepreneur who had competed with him remembered him as an ambitious young man: “He was visibly improving.” He described him as “kind and open,” with no suspicious behavior.
But behind this facade, a dark side was hidden. His life was marked by a dual identity: on the one hand, a passion for sport and apparent integration; on the other, a growing attraction to radical Islamism. In Germany, he had begun to follow and share on social media the sermons of some Salafi preachers from North Rhine-Westphalia, including Abdul Alim Hamza. Of Kosovar origin, Hamza’s real name is Leonis Hamza. Arrested in September 2024, he had managed to avoid deportation to Kosovo by filing an emergency appeal, which was accepted by the administrative court in Cologne. A controversial figure to say the least, he is the imam of a mosque that the German security services consider “a Salafist meeting place”.
His influence in the Islamist scene is considerable: he has relationships with prominent figures such as Pierre Vogel, Ibrahim El-Azzazi and Abu Dunja. But his circle of contacts extends beyond the religious world: he is known for his association with Arafat Abou-Chaker, boss of a powerful Berlin crime clan. Farhad Noor, increasingly immersed in this environment, seemed to be moving closer to a radical ideology. And one of the last signals before the attack had come from his social media: an image in which he appeared dressed in black, next to two unknown men, with a caption that left no room for doubt. The last sentence read: “Wipe from the face of the earth all those who are enemies of Islam.” He had deep ties to Afghanistan, but in recent times he seemed to have embraced its most extremist aspects. One of his last posts before the attack showed him in a forest, dressed in black and in the company of two unknown men. In the caption he had written words of a religious nature. The last sentence sounded like a disturbing omen: “Erase from the face of the earth all those who are enemies of Islam”.
