An eight-year-old boy is dead after a German migrant pushed the child and his mother in the path of an oncoming high-speed train.

Just before 10am on Monday, the pair were waiting to board a train from one of the platforms of the central railway terminal in Frankfurt when they were attacked by a 40-year-old Asylum Seeker from Eritrea, Africa.

According to RT News: “The assailant grabbed the woman and the child and threw them on the rail tracks right as the high-speed intercity express (ICE) was pulling into the station.”

A witness told German media that the 40-year-old woman made it to the pathway between two tracks, but as she reached out to grab her son the train ran over him.

The attacker, who then unsuccessfully attempted to throw a 78-year-old woman onto the railway tracks, tried to flee the scene but was pursued by passengers and detained by police.

The perpetrator and the victims are not believed to have known each other.

At the time of the attack, the Eritrean man was wanted by police in Switzerland for threatening a woman with a knife, attempting to strangle her, and lock her in an apartment. However, the attacker was not flagged in any databases in Germany and as a recognized refugee, was in Germany legally.

Germany’s federal interior minister Horst Seehofer reportedly said the attacker was a model refugee, claiming: “In a brochure from the firm where he works he was presented as a super integration case study.”

A similar attack occurred a week earlier when a 34-year-old German woman was killed after she was pushed on to train tracks in Voerde by a 28-year-old migrant of Serb-Kosovo origin.