A Syrian asylum-seeker who blew himself up outside a German music festival had made a video pledging allegiance to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) group, the authorities said yesterday.
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Carda Seidel, mayor of Ansbach, a city of roughly 50,000 that is home to 644 refugees, said that the bomber had received two deportation orders, most recently on July 13.
During a news conference, Herrman stated: “A provisional translation by an interpreter shows that he expressly announces, in the name of Allah, and testifying his allegiance to (Islamic State leader) Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.an act of revenge against the Germans because they’re getting in the way of Islam”.
The attack in Ansbach is the fourth violent attack to hit Germany over the past week.
The second attack on Sunday happened outside of a music festival in Ansbach.
More than 2,000 people were evacuated from the festival after the explosion, police said. Four people were in serious condition.
The request [for asylum] was denied, and under the auspices of the Dublin Regulation – a European Union law governing states’ responsibility for asylum seekers – the attacker was supposed to be deported to Bulgaria, the country where he had entered the EU, said Johannes Dimroth, spokesman for Germany’s Federal Interior Ministry.
Two days earlier, a German-Iranian man went on a deadly rampage at a Munich mall, killing nine people and leaving dozens wounded.
These attacks came shortly after a Tunisian man driving a truck killed 84 people when he plowed through a festive crowd celebrating Bastille Day in Nice, along the famed French Riviera.
Armin Nassehi, a sociologist at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, said that among the 1 million asylum seekers who were registered in Germany previous year, “there’s a big number of traumatized people who know nothing but violence – that’s a fact one can not ignore”. “For the police or politicians it might make a difference if some of these attacks were caused by mentally disturbed people without a specific terror agenda, but that’s all irrelevant now for most of the people”, said Thomas Jaeger, a political scientist at Cologne University.
However, the Bavarian interior minister, Joachim Herrmann, disagrees with police, saying his “personal view was that the attack was likely the work of an “Islamist” suicide bomber”.
“The Syrian in Ansbach was facing deportation and this was to Bulgaria”, he said.
Maiziere, however, said the problem was that there was no exhaustive, Europe-wide data base of radicalised potential attackers.
German media reported that the doctor had been shot dead, but police in Germany said that he was actually critically ill after the shooting at the University Hospital in Steglitz, Berlin.
The unprecedented bloodshed began July 18, when a 17-year-old from Afghanistan wielding an ax attacked people on a train near Wuerzburg, wounding five people before he was shot to death by police.
The assailant, who lived in Ansbach, was already known to police, in particular for an offence linked to drugs, Herrmann also told news agency DPA.
Investigators say the two teenagers met a year ago as in-patients at a psychiatric ward. Authorities said assailant and victim knew each other from working in the same restaurant, and the incident was not related to terrorism.
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Stephan Mayer, a deputy from Merkel’s conservative bloc, insisted that it was “completely wrong” to blame the government’s refugee policy for the recent rash of attacks.
