Angela Merkel has rejected calls to change Germany’s refugee policy following a wave of terror attacks in the country.
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She said that terrorists wanted Germany to “lose our view for what’s important to us”.
“Refusing humanitarian responsibility would have had just as many, or perhaps different but very bad, consequences for us that I would not risk and could not recommend to Germany”, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said during a news conference in Berlin, Germany, Thursday.
Bavarian officials have presented an anti-terror plan following four attacks in Germany in a week, two of which were claimed by the Islamic State extremist group.
“That two men who came to us as refugees are responsible for the acts in Wuerzburg and Ansbach mocks the country that took them in”, Merkel said.
While broad swathes of the political establishment and media have responded with unity in the wake of the attacks, some lawmakers in Merkel’s Christian Democratic-led bloc as well as politicians from the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, have revived criticism that Merkel has invited a security threat with her accommodating refugee policy.
On July 18, an asylum seeker from Afghanistan or Pakistan slashed train passengers and later a passer-by with an axe and a knife in Würzburg before being shot by police.
She said Germany would stick to its principles and continue to grant asylum protection to those fleeing wars.
But she offered few details on new measures, which she said would be discussed in the days and weeks ahead. “They spread hate between cultures and also among religions”. “Civilized taboos have been broken, the attacks happened in places where any of us could have been”.
She continued: “But I am as convinced today as I was back then that we will manage our historic duty [of accepting refugees] …”
Joachim Herrmann, interior minister for Bavaria where three of the four recent attacks occurred, vowed Thursday to add 2,000 more police officers during the next four years and increase law enforcement intelligence efforts.
The deadliest recent attack – in Munich on July 22 which left nine persons dead – was carried out by a German-Iranian teenager but was not associated with the IS terrorist group.
The attacks have burst any illusions in Germany that the country is immune to attacks like those claimed by the so-called Islamic State in neighbouring France.
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He had been under psychiatric treatment and investigators say he was obsessed with mass shooting, including Norwegian righ-wing fanatic Anders Behring Breivik’s 2011 massacre.
