AN AMERICAN model was left with horrifying stab wounds after being attacked while protecting two women on a German tram.

John Rudat, 21, from upstate New York, was reportedly assaulted in the city of Dresden on Sunday – and has since claimed his attacker was an “illegal immigrant”.

He suffered a “deep facial wound” from the blade, and had to undergo extensive surgery in Germany.

But in a video posted to his Instagram account hours after the attack, he blasted the police and asserted that his assailant was an illegal immigrant in the country.

Shocking images released in the aftermath show him with bloody tissues and bandages all over his face.

“He doesn’t even belong in here,” Rudat claimed.

“He is an immigrant, an illegal one, a drug dealer and very popularly known here, especially by the police.”

Rudat, who is also a paramedic, stepped in to defend the women from two attackers while he was in Germany to visit his former foreign exchange host family.

Cops caught one of the two alleged attackers, who was described as a 21-year-old Syrian national.

The suspect was later released due to lack of evidence, according to German paper Bild, while the other remains at large.

Police are still on the hunt for the second suspect.

Rudat added: “If they could do this to the people and then just get released 12 hours later, even less at this point, where’s the law? Where’s the structure?

“If Germans are held to that law and that structure, but these people could just come in, swing knives, and hurt, abuse, terrorise and oppress citizens of Germany then what do we do?”

A GoFundMe set up by his brother’s girlfriend Molly Sheldon has raised more than $45,000 of its $70,000 target at time of writing.

Sheldon wrote: “This horrible act against John leaves us devastated and seeking justice.

“He now faces a challenging recovery; physically, emotionally, and even financially as he works to heal from this incident.

“We are all heartbroken but determined to support him through this ordeal.”

But in an interview on Monday, Rudat toned down the message from his Instagram video, instead saying it was a “problem of violence”.

“Germany and German citizens have been rather quiet about events like these,” he said according to The New York Post.

“They tend to come with a natural political connotation that takes away from the actual problem.”

“The problem to me wasn’t anyone’s skin colour, wasn’t anyone’s race, wasn’t anybody’s anything.

“It was the fact that a woman was being harassed and assaulted.”

The US Embassy in Berlin released a statement calling on Germany’s cops to catch the attacker.

It reads: “We strongly condemn the brutal attack on an American citizen in Dresden.

“While courageously intervening to protect a fellow passenger, he was viciously attacked.

“We urge German authorities to swiftly bring the perpetrators to justice and punish them to the fullest extent permitted by law.”