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ISIS Takes Credit For Ansbach Attack

It was carried out by a 27-year-old Syrian national in the southern city of Ansbach.

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German MPs have called for failed asylum seekers to be deported more quickly, following the suicide bombing in Ansbach in which 15 people were injured.

The attack in Ansbach, a serene city of about 40,000 west of Nuremberg, came near the end of the closing night of a popular open air festival being attended by about 2,000 people.

The attacker announced in the video “in the name of Allah that he pledged allegiance to [IS chief] Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi… and announced an act of revenge against Germans because they were standing in the way of Islam”, Mr Hermann said.

In Berlin on Monday, Germany’s interior minister, Thomas de Maizière, cautioned that “in the Ansbach incident, neither a link to global Islamic State terrorism nor a mental disorder of the perpetrator can be ruled out”, adding, “It could be a combination of both”.

Seehofer leads the Christian Social Union, the sister party to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrats, and has always been a vocal critic of the refugee influx for which Bavaria was the primary gateway.

ISIS’ Amaq news agency said yesterday that the bomber was one of its soldiers. But Bavarian authorities said he had received his expulsion orders almost two weeks before he blew himself up.

Most of the terrorists who carried out attacks in recent months in Europe were not refugees.

He was facing imminent deportation to Bulgaria, where he was first registered as an asylum seeker, an interior ministry spokesman said.

Special force police officers stand guard at an entrance of the main train station, following a shooting rampage at the Olympia shopping mall in Munich.

In the other attack, a 17-year-old Afghan asylum-seeker wounded five people with an axe before being killed by police near the Bavarian city of Wuerzburg.

A police spokeswoman told AFP that several shots were fired at a university hospital in the well-heeled southwestern Steglitz neighbourhood of the German capital.

The bombing has rattled the German public following a week of violence in southern Germany that began on July 18, when an immigrant teen, apparently also inspired by ISIS, stabbed passengers on a train in Wurzburg in Bavaria. Witnesses described a scene of chaos and fear that has become all too familiar in Germany and neighboring countries following a string of deadly attacks.

Over one million refugees entered Germany a year ago under Germany’s open-door refugee policy.

De Maiziere said the man had attempted to take his own life twice before in Germany, and had been in psychiatric care.

Meanwhile, The Associated Press reported from Beirut on Monday that the militant group had claimed responsibility for the attack.

“All the retrieved contents, materials and circumstances suggest that this attack could have an Islamist background”, Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann said of the initial investigation. The teen, who had dual German and Iranian nationality, was obsessed with mass killings and spent a year preparing for the shooting spree, according to police.

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Police said the woman was 45 years old and from Poland.

Ansbach explosion: Bomber pledged allegiance to IS