Merkel has been criticized for her comment ever since by right-wing populists and members of her own coalition alike.
Advertisement
“We have already achieved very, very much in the last 11 months”. Merkel also noted that changes needed to be introduced in the country’s security arrangements: “We need a better system of intelligence on the threats of radicalization”, she acknowledged.
Since a year ago, Germany opened its borders to over one million migrants and refugees fleeing war, persecution and poverty in the Middle East, Africa and Asia, and majority from Syria.
Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann didn’t specify Thursday which country the person was in and added that investigators don’t know his or her identity, news agency dpa reported.
“I did not say that it would be an easy task”, Merkel told reporters about finding a solution to the refugee crisis, adding she had expected challenges ahead when she made the decision to open borders last summer. They want to harm our life and our openness. They sow hatred and fear between cultures.
“For me it is clear: We will stick to our fundamental principles”, the German chancellor said in a press conference in Berlin, according to The Wall Street Journal. “Our understanding of freedom and security is being tested”. The government “will do everything humanly possible to ensure security in our free, democratic state of law, ” she said.
German conservatives and even some of the left-wing opposition and supporters of Merkel have said that her government’s open-door refugee policy has been a failure.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has been forced to defend her refugee policies, after the country became the target of a spate of recent terror attacks. Global treaties, however, forbid countries from returning migrants to places of danger, such a war-ravaged Syria, even if a migrant has been refused refugee status.
“I didn’t say this as if it were something that we could do easily, otherwise I wouldn’t have said it”, Merkel said.
“There is another risk of perpetrators that have not come to the attention of authorities”. “These acts happened in places where any of us could have been”.
Two attacks in Bavaria – an axe attack last week near Würzburg and a suicide bombing on Sunday in Ansbach – were carried out by a refugee and failed asylum seeker respectively.
“I am disappointed by the unwillingness of some in Europe to accept refugees”, she said. He had been informed two weeks earlier that he was to be deported in 30 days.
In Reutlingen a Syrian killed a woman and injured two others.
Advertisement
The teenager who carried out the Munich shooting, meanwhile, was a German-Iranian who prided himself on sharing a birthday with Adolf Hitler and appeared to have targeted foreigners.
