Germany would do “everything humanly possible” to ensure security, she said, although there would have to be a “thorough analysis” before specific new measures were drawn up. Merkel said she had never heard of negotiators reaching a compromise three months before the end of talks.
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“Islamist terrorism has unfortunately arrived in Bavaria”, the state’s interior minister Joachim Herrmann told reporters Thursday, renewing calls by his Christian Social Union party for an upper limit on the number of new asylum seekers.
The attackers “shame the country that welcomed them” as well as all the refugees who need protection, she said at a press conference in Berlin.
Islamist groups had exploited this opportunity to smuggle terrorists into Europe and Germany, she conceded, “mocking the country” that helped refugees.
12 people were injured this week, 3 of them severely, in a terror attack that took place in the city of Ansbach in Bavaria, Germany, after a 27-year-old Syrian who was denied refugee status committed a suicide attack with an explosive device in his backpack.
Heading into the last year of her third term, after 11 years in power coloured by more crises than many of her predecessors combined, Dr Merkel refused to take the bait when asked if it had all left her exhausted.
Proposed measures include lowering barriers to deport refugees who do not receive asylum and creating an “early warning system” to detect radicalization among migrants.
Unlike French President Francois Hollande, who on Tuesday visited Normandy where two assailants killed a priest, Merkel has not been to the scene of any of the attacks in Germany – an absence that has raised questions about her leadership.
The chancellor cut short her vacation this week to hold her annual summer news conference. She had faced criticism from opponents for her muted response to four violent attacks that shook the country over the past 10 days. “I have the feeling that I acted responsibly and correctly and no other feeling”.
In her most comprehensive remarks since a wave of violence this month, Ms Merkel described a new veil of fear gripping Europe yet stood by her determination to offer asylum to those truly in need.
But in reference to her famous phrase “Wir schaffen das!”
“I am convinced today as I was before that we can do it”, she said, adding that Germany had an “historical mission, an historical challenge in a time of globalisation”.
Three of the four attackers were asylum seekers, and two of the assaults were claimed by Islamic State.
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Merkel said of the plan that “there are a lot of things on which we agree”.
