Germany has not been a target of major attacks, but in May, a mentally unstable 27-year-old man wielding a knife killed one person and injured three others on another Bavarian regional train.
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German police said on Tuesday the attack on a train on Monday night was probably politically motivated.
Joachim Herrmann, Bavaria’s interior minister, told broadcaster ZDF that investigators raiding the attacker’s room in a foster home found a hand-painted Islamic State flag. (“God is great!”) as he attacked the passengers with an ax and knife, injuring five people, two of them critically.
Hong Kong leader Leung Chun-ying condemned the attack, which he said injured four of five members of a Hong Kong family that was on holiday in Germany.
In this image taken from video police officer look on as the body of a 17-years-old attacker is carried to a hearse in Wuerzburg, southern Germany, Tuesday morning, July 19, 2016.
The Federal Ministry of the Interior stated that police shot the suspect, and police now say he has been killed.
The train was on its way from the Bavarian town of Treuchtlingen to Wuerzburg, 60 miles north-west of Nuremberg.
The attacker injured at least four people on the train near Wuerzburg-Heidingsfeld on Monday night, and also a woman outside the train as he fled.
Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack, according to its Amaq news agency.
Germany has thus far escaped the kind of large-scale jihadist attack seen in the southern French city of Nice last week, in which 31-year-old Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel used a truck to mow down 84 people. The teenage son was not hurt.
It was not immediately possible to verify that the man in the video was the train attacker.
The attacker tried to attack the police and was shot dead by the police.
Herrmann said people close to the attacker told investigators he had seemed like a calm person, not overtly religious or an extremist.
The teenager had gone to the mosque “on special occasions”, he said, but no-one had noticed any radical behaviour and there were no signs yet of a direct link to jihadist networks.
Germany welcomed about one million migrants in 2015, many fleeing war in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq.
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Fear for a large scale terrorist attack in Germany has been brewing, with major terrorist attacks taking place in both France, Belgium, and the United states this past year. He is being held in a psychiatric hospital.
