A Syrian asylum seeker blew himself up outside a music festival and wounded 15 other people in Ansbach on Sunday, 6 days after 4 passengers on a train and a passer-by were wounded in an axe attack by another asylum seeker in Wuerzburg.
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Frauke Kohler, a spokeswoman for the attorney general’s office in German city of Karlsruhe, acknowledged the video circulated by the Islamic State was the same one authorities found on the bomber’s mobile phone.
The Islamic State’s news agency later claimed responsibility for the attack.
“A provisional translation by an interpreter shows that he expressly announces, in the name of Allah, and testifying his allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, a famous Islamist leader, an act of revenge against the Germans because they’re getting in the way of Islam”, Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Hermann said. Police said he may have planned the attack for a year.
He also says, “And to the German youth: your planes that are shelling us don’t distinguish between men, women and even children”.
The man, who entered Germany in 2014 as a refugee but was denied asylum, set off an explosion around 10 p.m. Sunday at a bar outside the entrance to the festival, which was attended by about 2,000 people. The 21-year-old Syrian asylum seeker came to Germany one year ago, according to a police statement, and he was known to police for property thefts and assault. Fifteen were rushed to hospital with serious, though not life-threatening, injuries.
Roman Fertinger, the deputy police chief in Nuremberg, said there likely would have been more casualties if the man had not been turned away.
Horst Seehofer, the interior minister of Bavaria where three of last week’s attacks took place told the daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung Tuesday: “We must know who is in our country”.
“Our sympathies go out to the injured of this perfidious and brutal bomb attack in Ansbach”, said Mr Seehofer. “But our constitutional order will not yield”. They said they would try to “determine if thus-far unknown accomplices or backers were involved in the crime”.
“Of course I would and will initiate appropriate amendments if they are necessary or if I think they are necessary, but only then”, he said.
These laws present a major problem for German officials attempting to deport any Syrian refugees they might consider unsafe or undesirable. “Some of them don’t have a right to be here”, he said.
The U.S. military has a facility in Ansbach, and following the attack it increased security there. Witnesses described a scene of chaos and fear that has become all too familiar in Germany and neighboring countries following a string of deadly attacks. Police found and shot him dead.
Police said neither Sunday’s machete attack nor Friday’s shooting in Munich bore any sign of connections with Islamic State or other militant groups.
In Ansbach, eyewitnesses said the blast was so strong they felt it in their bodies. Police did not issue an official comment.
“Nothing can be covered up but nothing should be exaggerated”.
The attacks left ten victims dead and dozens wounded and have rekindled concerns about Germany’s ability to cope with the estimated 1 million migrants registered entering the country a year ago.
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In Berlin on Monday, Germany’s interior minister, Thomas de Maizière, cautioned that “in the Ansbach incident, neither a link to global Islamic State terrorism nor a mental disorder of the perpetrator can be ruled out”, adding, “It could be a combination of both”.
