A failed Syrian asylum seeker who
blew himself up outside a German music festival had made a video pledging
allegiance to the Islamic State group, in the second attack claimed by the
jihadists in Germany in a week. The 27-year-old assailant wounded 15 people,
four of them seriously, near a cafe in the southern city of Ansbach on Sunday
night when he set off a bomb in his rucksack, killing himself.
“A video made by the assailant was found on
his mobile phone in which he threatened an attack,” Bavarian state interior
minister Joachim Herrmann told reporters.
“After that he announced in the name
of Allah that he pledged allegiance to (IS chief) Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the
well-known Islamist leader, and announced an act of revenge against Germans
because they were standing in the way of Islam.”
IS later said via the jihadist-linked Amaq
news agency that the attacker “was a soldier of the Islamic State” who had
acted “in response to calls to target nations in the coalition fighting” the
extremists. Europe’s economic powerhouse was already reeling after nine people
were killed in a shopping centre shooting spree in Munich on Friday and five
people were wounded in an axe attack on a train in Wuerzburg on July 18.
IS also claimed the axe rampage. All three brutal
incidents were in Bavaria, the southern state which has been a gateway for tens
of thousands of refugees under Chancellor Angela Merkel’s liberal asylum
policy.
Merkel’s deputy spokeswoman Ulrike
Demmer expressed the government’s “shock” after the rash of attacks but also
warned against branding all refugees a security threat. “Most of the terrorists
who carried out attacks in recent months in Europe were not refugees,”
she told reporters. “The terrorism
threat (among refugees) is not larger or smaller than in the population at
large.” Police said the Syrian man intended to target the open-air festival but
was turned away as he did not have a ticket, and detonated the device outside a
nearby cafe.
“If he had made it inside, there
would certainly have been more victims,” a police spokesman said. The explosion
went off in the centre of the city of Ansbach, not far from where more than
2,500 people had gathered for the concert, at around 10 pm (2000 GMT).
‘Friendly, inconspicuous’ The
attacker, who came to Germany two years ago but had his asylum claim rejected
after a year, had tried to kill himself twice in the past and had spent time in
a psychiatric clinic, authorities said.
He was facing imminent deportation
to Bulgaria, where he was first registered within the European Union as an
asylum seeker and which had granted his claim, a German interior ministry
spokesman said. The assailant, who lived in Ansbach, was already known to
police, having been linked to a drug-related offence.
However a social worker who knew him, Reinhold
Eschenbacher, described him as “friendly, inconspicuous and nice” when he came
to his office pick up his welfare benefits, DPA news agency reported. Stephan
Mayer, a deputy from Merkel’s conservative bloc, said it was “completely wrong”
to blame the government’s refugee policy for the spate of assaults.
But Mayer told the BBC that the 1.1 million
migrants and refugees Germany let in last year represented a “big challenge”
for law enforcement, even as the influx has dwindled in recent months.
“We were not able to register and
control all the migrants that crossed the German border,” Mayer admitted.
Europe has been on edge for months after a string of deadly attacks claimed by
IS, including bombings in Brussels and Paris and the carnage at Bastille Day
celebrations in the southern French city of Nice.
Chilling precision Meanwhile police released
more details on Munich mall attacker David Ali Sonboly, saying the 18-year-old
was depressed and had spent two months in a psychiatric unit last year. The
teen, who had German and Iranian nationality, was obsessed with mass killings including
Norwegian rightwing fanatic Anders Behring Breivik’s 2011 massacre and spent a year preparing for the shooting
spree, police said.
At least 35 people were also wounded
during Sonboly’s attack, which began at a McDonald’s franchise and ended with
him turning his 9mm Glock pistol on himself. Investigators have ruled out any
link with IS jihadists, although he appeared to have planned the assault with chilling
precision for a year.
Police detained a 16-year-old Afghan
friend in connection with the shooting but later released him for lack of
evidence. Already steeped in grief and shock, Germans were further rattled by
news that a Syrian refugee had killed a 45-year-old Polish woman with a large
kebab knife at a snack bar in the southwestern city of Reutlingen.
Police, who had initially said the murder weapon was a machete, added that Sunday’s incident in which three others were injured was likely a “crime of passion”. Three people were also injured in the attack, which ended when the 21-year-old assailant was deliberately struck by a BMW driver trying to stop the man.
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