Bavaria’s top security official says a man who blew himself up after being turned away from an open-air music festival in the southern German city was a 27-year-old Syrian who had been denied asylum.
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EXPLOSIVES, METAL PARTS Hermann said the man, whose identity has not yet been released, had been living in Ansbach for some time.
“It is my personal assessment that I unfortunately believe it very likely that a real suicide attack took place here”, Herrmann told DPA early Monday.
“We don’t know if this man planned on suicide or if he had the intention of killing others”, Bavarian interior minister Joachim Herrmann said.
“It’s bad. that someone who came into our country to seek shelter has now committed such a heinous act and injured a large number of people who are at home here, some seriously”, Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann told reporters at a hastily convened news conference early on Monday.
Police said 12 people were wounded, including three seriously, in the attack in Ansbach, a small town of 40,000 people southwest of Nuremberg that is also home to a U.S. Army base.
The final night of the three-day Ansbach Open music festival in the heart of the city, around 90 miles north of Munich, was under way on Sunday evening when the chaos began.
In another incident, an axe-wielding teenager had injured few people after he attacked a train in Wuerzburg.
Earlier Sunday, a Syrian man killed a woman with a machete and wounded two others outside a bus station in the southwestern city of Reutlingen before being arrested.
The assailant was apparently acting alone, the police official said.
There was no immediate word on possible motives for the explosion, but police said neither Sunday’s machete attack nor Friday’s shooting in Munich bore any sign of connections with Daesh or other militant groups. A 17-year-old Afghan asylum-seeker was shot and killed by police as he fled the scene. Jethro Tull frontman Ian Anderson was the scheduled performer.
Bavarian public broadcaster Bayerische Rundfunk reported that about 200 police officers and 350 rescue personnel were brought in following the explosion in Ansbach. It also claimed responsibility for the July 14 attack in which a Tunisian man drove a truck into Bastille Day holiday crowds in the French city of Nice, killing 84 people. IS said it was also responsible for the attack by 31-year-old Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel.
Herrmann has called those regulations obsolete and said that Germans have a “right to safety”.
In January a programme was launched in the city to help refugees assimilate by teaching them the basics of law in their new host country.
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Classes include lessons about freedom of opinion, the separation of religion and state and the equality of men and women.
