Reports of the shooting occured the same day top security officials in the country called for tougher security screening of asylum-seekers and also announced that more police officers will be hired following four attacks in the country in the span of a week – two of them claimed by the extremist Islamic State group.
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The attacker, identified as Mohammad D, was killed in the blast and 15 people were injured.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel is “mourning with the families of the woman killed in Reutlingen” and her “thoughts are with the families of those injured in Reutlingen and Ansbach”, her deputy spokeswoman Ulrike Demmer said Monday.
Most of the immigrants entering Germany a year ago came through Bavaria, and Bavarian authorities have been particularly critical of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open-door policies. Earlier last week, a 17-year-old Afghan asylum-seeker attacked passengers with an axe on a train near Wuerzburg, wounding five people before being shot dead by police. More than a million migrants entered Germany over the past year, many fleeing war in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq. Though the man was denied asylum in 2015, he stayed on in Germany under a special category called “Duldung”, meaning that his presence would be tolerated.
Federal authorities say they have more than 400 lines of inquiry relating to fighters or members of Islamist groups who are among the many hundreds of thousands of people offered refuge in the country over recent years – with Mr de Maiziere describing that as a tiny minority.
“We need to do whatever is necessary to protect our citizens”, Seehofer said.
The Syrian man who blew himself up outside a bar in Ansbach vowed the people of Germany “won’t be able to sleep peacefully anymore” in a video filmed before the attack.
The country’s interior minister said the failed asylum seeker left behind a video pledging allegiance to ISIL on his mobile phone and possessed gasoline, chemicals, and other materials that could be used to make a bomb.
The man in the video, his face covered with a black scarf, threatens to make life intolerable and warned: “We will blow up your homes”. Germany is not involved in combat operations but has contributed reconnaissance aircraft to the effort.
After the IS connection surfaced, federal prosecutors in Karlsruhe, who investigate all suspected terrorism, took over the case saying they would seek to “determine if thus-far unknown accomplices or backers were involved in the crime”. It turned out that he had already registered in Bulgaria and later in Austria, so Germany rejected his request and ordered him deported to Bulgaria – most recently on July 13.
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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.
