She said the attackers “wanted to undermine our sense of community, our openness and our willingness to help people in need”.
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“They want to divide our unity, our cooperation, they want to harm our life”, she said. The fourth attack, by a Syrian refugee who killed a woman south of Stuttgart, was unrelated to terror activity, police said.
“The attacks in Germany, along with those recently in Nice and Rouen in France, were meant to “spread fear and hatred between cultures and between religions”, Merkel said”.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the spate of terror attacks in Germany are “horrifying and depressing” but won’t move the government to turn its back on Middle East refugees.
BERLIN (AP) – German Chancellor Angela Merkel has defended a planned trade deal between the USA and the European Union as “absolutely in Europe’s interest”. ISIS claimed both attacks.
But she said that Germany had faced such challenges before, repeating the phrase “We can do it” several times.
The Chancellor also spoke of the concrete measures her government plans to take in response to the attacks, including a desire to create a central agency for information security which would have the ability to decode encrypted communications.
“Wherever there are gaps, we will have to act – just as we have so far – so that it is clear that we are doing everything humanly possible to ensure security in our free, democratic state of law”, Merkel said.
She refuted that this was the most hard point in her chancellorship.
Dr Merkel was speaking after a axe rampage, a shooting spree, a knife attack and a suicide bombing stunned the country, leaving 13 dead, including three assailants, and dozens wounded.
Merkel told a news conference that the country “would remain faithful to its principles and would provide refuge for those who deserve it”.
The bloodiest incident, a shooting spree in Munich on July 22 that killed 10 people including the assailant, was unrelated to worldwide terror. “Fear can not be the guide for political action”, Merkel said about the violent events, calling them “shocking, aggrieving, and also depressing”. It was 17 hours before Dr Merkel commented on Friday’s gun attack in Munich, only after it emerged that the perpetrator was an 18-year-old German-born gunman with no apparent Islamist links.
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A Pakistani claiming to be an Afghan refugee injured five people on a train near Würzburg last week.
