This still image taken from an undated video posted on The Aamaq news agency, which is affiliated to the Islamic State group, purports to show a 17-year-old Afghan asylum-seeker who attacked people with an ax and knife on a train in southern Germany, making a statement in Pashto while brandishing a knife.
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ISIS claimed the man in the video was instructed to carry out an attack, but German authorities said Wednesday that there is no evidence he was a member of the group.
Though the Islamic State group claimed responsibility, Herrmann said the suspect, whose identity has not been released, had written notes in his native Pashto that indicated he may have been self-radicalized.
Germany is likely to face more Islamist attacks, its interior minister said on Wednesday (Thursday NZ Time), but played down any link between the government’s open-door refugee policy and Monday’s axe assault on a train in Bavaria.
Speaking on German public television, Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann said it was too early to speculate about the motives of the attacker, who he said was believed to have been living in a home for unaccompanied minors in Ochsenfurt, near the city of Wuerzburg.
“The first emergency call that the police headquarters received was about a witness who said that the attacker carried out attacks causing serious injuries and he had called out Allahu Akbar”, Herrmann said.
Yesterday, he seriously injured the four passengers on a local train between the town of Treuchtlingen and Wuerzburg in Bavaria, southern Germany.
An eyewitness who lives next to the railway station told DPA news agency the train carriage, which had been carrying around 25 people, looked “like a slaughterhouse” with blood covering the floor and seats.
The injured Hongkongers – an unnamed married couple, their 26-year-old daughter Tracy Yau Hiu-tung and her 31-year-old boyfriend Edmund Au Yeung – were attacked by the youngster on the train on Monday night.
When he began to attack officers with the axe, the teenager was shot dead by police. Two of the wounded are in critical condition.
He wasn’t on authorities’ radar, and people who knew him said he seemed to be fitting in.
The attacker was registered as a refugee on June 30 a year ago, officials said.
Another woman was wounded after the assailant jumped from the train and fled.
Police chased the attacker and then met him very close to the river where they confronted him, Herrmann said.
Germany past year registered more than 1 million asylum seekers entering the country, including more than 150,000 Afghans.
German officials were checking if the man in the video was in fact the train attacker. The attacker is now in a psychiatric hospital.
Imam Arbab Ahmad, whose mosque in Wuerzburg lies about 12 kilometres (7.5 miles) from the scene of the attack, said he feared a backlash against Muslims after the attack.
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Europe, swamped with Middle Eastern refugees and migrants, has been rocked by repeated terrorist attacks that have killed dozens of people in France and Belgium – most recently when a French-Tunisian national shot and ran down Bastille Day revelers with a truck in Nice, France.
