Suicide bomber who injured 12 pledged his allegiance to IS
AN Islamic suicide bomber who blew himself up outside a music festival was a failed asylum seeker facing deportation, German authorities revealed yesterday.
Syrian Mohammed Deleel, 27, detonated a DIY bomb filled with metal shavings and screws at the entrance to the festival in the Bavarian town of Ansbach.
He died instantly during Sunday’s attack which left 12 people injured, three of them seriously.
Deleel had a video in Arabic on his mobile phone showing him threatening Germans in the name of Allah “because they help to kill Muslims”.
He invoked the name of Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and police later found violent videos and bomb-making material at Deleel’s home.
A crowd of 2,500 people was at the Ansbach festival when backpack-carrying Deleel detonated his bomb after he was challenged for not having a ticket.
Splinters
Witness Kevin Krieger said: “A band was playing when suddenly there was a loud bang. There were two people on the ground. They had injuries to their heads and necks.”
Nicknamed Rambo by neighbours because he was muscular and did regular workouts, Deleel came from Aleppo, Syria, and had been in the country for two years.
His application to settle in Germany was turned down but he was still allowed to stay because of concerns about his mental health after two suicide attempts.
Police believe he may have been an IS jihadist in Aleppo. His corpse bore the scars of what security experts said were “war wounds”. Shrapnel splinters in his feet were said to be particularly significant. It emerged yesterday that Deleel had twice evaded being thrown out of Germany after he was refused asylum but was now facing deportation to Bulgaria.
The bombing ended a week of bloodshed in Germany.
On Monday a disturbed Afghan refugee, Riaz Khan Ahmadzai, 17, seriously injured five tourists in an axe attack on a train in Bavaria. He was shot dead by police.
Literature at his home showed he had been radicalised into jihadism.
On Friday came the bloodbath in the state capital of Munich when former psychiatric patient Ali David Sonboly, 18, murdered nine people in a shopping centre. Sonboly then killed himself.
On Sunday a Syrian man wielding a machete murdered a pregnant woman in Reutlingen, 150 miles from Munich. He attacked and injured five more people before he was run down by a BMW driver.