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Germany to present raft of security measures after July attacks

Thomas de Maiziere, the German interior minister, is to detail a series of new proposals on Thursday, including the deportation of preachers who incite terror.

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Police investigators work at the site of a suicide bombing in Ansbach, southern Germany, on July 25, 2016.

15 people, including four attackers, have been killed.

The new measures to be announced Thursday include speeding up the expulsion process for asylum seekers convicted of crimes, Bild daily reported, quoting anonymous security sources.

The incidents put the focus back on the government’s migration policy, which resulted in more than a million migrants entering Germany previous year, majority fleeing war and conflict in Syria, Afghanistan or Iraq, although the influx has since been stemmed.

Police say they received a tip-off that an attack was being planned in the state.

“We live in hard times”.

The influx of mainly Muslim refugees and the Islamist attacks in France and Belgium this year and last have made security fears one of Germans’ biggest concerns.

The Koelner Stadt-Anzeiger said the new legislation would also facilitate data retention and limit how long migrants whose asylum applications have been rejected could stay in Germany. The spokesman for the federal Interior Ministry said the document, the “Berlin declaration”, was still under consultation.

A German doctors’ association is expressing skepticism at reported government plans to loosen patient confidentiality obligations in an effort to tighten security laws following recent attacks.

According to local media reports, state ministers from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union and her ally party the Christian Social Union (CSU) also want to introduce further security laws.

Separately, the centre-right interior ministers of Germany’s federal states have put forward a list of 27 demands to improve security. The ministers would also deploy up to 15,000 more police officers’ by 2020 and arm them more heavily, as well as affix them with body cameras and increase video surveillance of public places and transit.

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The demands ahead of a meeting of the state ministers and de Maiziere on August 18 will put additional pressure on Merkel’s government to tighten security legislation.

Police inspectors search a car