A tourist from America, who suffered a violent stabbing while intervening to defend two women on a tram in Germany, criticized Europe’s “immigration issue” after learning that one of the alleged attackers had been released.

John Rudat, a 21-year-old model from upstate New York, openly criticized Europe’s policies in an Instagram video shortly after the incident occurred.

“If you weren’t aware of Europe’s immigration challenges, particularly in Germany, let me enlighten you,” Rudat stated, his face still covered in bandages from the severe assault.

At the time he recorded the video, it was approximately three minutes to midnight — when one of the alleged assailants was set to be released after authorities found no evidence linking him to the knife attack.

Rudat, though, insisted he was being released in part because he wasn’t a citizen of Germany, or the greater European Union.

“He doesn’t even belong in here. He is an immigrant, an illegal one, a drug dealer and very popularly known here, especially by the police,” Rudat claimed.

The impact of citizenship on the detention of immigrants and tourists varies based on various factors, including the person’s country of origin, severity of the charge, and possibility of extradition.

The model claimed that the immigrant had been remanded many times before, including for similar instances of trying to assault young women.

“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, terrorize and oppress citizens of Germany then what do we do?” Rudat lamented.

Rudat was asked about his comments several times in a Monday interview, where he changed his tune and said the attack boiled down to simply a “problem of violence.”

“Germany and German citizens have been rather quiet about events like these. They tend to come with a natural political connotation that takes away from the actual problem,” Rudat said. “The problem to me wasn’t anyone’s skin color, wasn’t anyone’s race, wasn’t anybody’s anything. It was the fact that a woman was being harassed and assaulted.”

“The problem of violence transcends a political party. Everybody, no matter what their side of political party, should look at this and see it for what it was: an act of violence perpetrated on somebody that could not defend herself with an intervention from someone who was in a position to do so,” he added.

The US embassy in Germany called on local law enforcement to catch Rudat’s assailants who are still at large.

“We urge German authorities to swiftly bring the perpetrators to justice and punish them to the fullest extent permitted by law. Safety is a collective responsibility—no one is safe until all are safe,” the embassy said in a statement.