Deadly attacks carried out by asylum seekers in Germany will not lead to a change in Germany’s refugee policy, Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Thursday.
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She said that terrorists wanted Germany to “lose our view for what’s important to us”.
“They sow hatred and fear between cultures and they sow hatred and fear between religions”. She also said that refugees who engage in terror are mocking the German government.
The online magazine of the Islamic State group has described how a 27-year-old Syrian asylum-seeker who blew himself up at a bar in the southern German town of Ansbach spent months planning the attack, once even hiding his home-made bomb in his room moments before a police raid.
Talking about the four assaults which took place in the country within a week, she said the incidents were shocking, oppressive and depressing, but not a sign that authorities had lost control, reports the Guardian.
Ms Merkel repeated her rallying cry from previous year when she opened the borders to people fleeing war and persecution, many from Syria, which brought almost 1.1 million migrants and refugees to the country in 2015.
On July 18, a teenaged Afghan asylum seeker attacked train passengers with an axe in Wurzburg after declaring allegiance to IS and was shot dead by police, The Independent reported.
“Wir schaffen das [we’ll manage it]”, Merkel said, repeating the famous phrase she uttered nearly a year ago which set off a dramatic wave of migration to Germany.
Four brutal assaults in Germany’s south, three of which were carried out by asylum seekers, have rattled Germans and revived a backlash against Merkel’s decision a year ago to open the borders to those fleeing war and persecution.
Germany would do “everything humanly possible” to ensure security, she said, although there would have to be a “thorough analysis” before specific new measures were drawn up.
Chancellor Angela Merkel interrupted her vacation on Thursday to face down accusations at home and overseas that her open-door refugee policy allowed Islamist terrorism to take hold in Germany.
“I am convinced today as I was before that we can do it”, she said, adding that Germany had an “historical mission, an historical challenge in a time of globalisation”. On July 22, 9 people were killed in Munich during mall shooting carried out by a German of Iranian origin.
“As chancellor, I am responsible for, by far, most decisions”.
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The first real political test for Merkel will come in September, when her home state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania holds elections. More than 1 million asylum-seekers were registered in Germany in 2015.
