Angela Merkel faced furious demands yesterday to end her open-door refugee policy as the first suicide bombing on German soil plunged the country into angst and exposed loopholes in the screening of migrants.
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Asked by a journalist if terrorists entering Europe is the price we pay for our humanity, Merkel replied: “We know since at least the Paris attacks that Isis also use refugee routes to smuggle terrorist through”.
“I am still convinced today that “we can do it” – it is our historic duty and this is a historic challenge in times of globalization”, she said.
It follows a chaotic week in which an asylum seeker purportedly from Afghanistan went on a stabbing rampage in Würzburg and an asylum applicant from Syria blew himself up outside a music festival in Ansbach. IS claimed both attacks.
While other European neighbours have increased their terror warning, Dr Merkel said now was the time for cool heads and retooling existing security and integration measures.
She said the attacks had shown the “taboos of civilization” had been broken.
Last year, the chancellor was mocked online after reducing a Palestinian girl to tears by explaining her policy on asylum and adding that “sometimes politics is hard”.
While Merkel has been criticized for the amount of refugees that Germany has taken in, most western countries, including Germany, have taken in a very small percentage of asylum seekers that exist, with many more seeking shelter in poor countries such as Turkey and Lebanon. The man had pledged allegiance to IS group leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, according to the Bavarian interior minister.
The deadliest recent attack – in Munich on 22 July which left nine dead – was carried out by a German teenager of Iranian extraction but was not jihadist-related.
She said that terrorists wanted to reduce Germany’s readiness to take in refugees but she added that her government was against that.
Again and again she refused to admit any failures in the a year ago but, with an eye on damage limitation, Dr Merkel pointed out that all decisions she took were made in consensus with other political players, police and security services.
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However, these latest attacks fuel concerns as to whether Germany is coping with the numbers it has had to process. France has been repeatedly targeted by terrorists since January 2015, when Islamist gunmen stormed the office of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and gunned down 12 staff members over cartoons of the Islamic prophet Muhammad.
