Germany on edge after several attacks
Syrian blows self up, hurts 12 at music fest
ANSBACH, Germany — A man who blew himself up and injured 12 people after being turned away from an open-air music festival was a 27-yearold Syrian who had been denied asylum, Bavaria’s top security official said early Monday.
“We don’t know if this man planned on suicide or if he had the intention of killing others,” Bavarian interior minister Joachim Herrmann said.
He added that the man’s request for asylum was rejected a year ago, but he was allowed to remain in Germany because of the strife in Syria.
Three of the 12 victims suffered serious injuries, Herrmann said.
A spokesman for the prosecutor’s office in Ansbach said the attacker’s motive wasn’t clear. “If there is an Islamist link or not is purely speculation at this point,” said the spokesman, Michael Schrotberger.
The explosion came as Germany, and the southern state of Bavaria in particular, have been on edge. Just two days earlier, a man went on a deadly rampage at a Munich mall, killing nine people and leaving dozens wounded.
And an ax attack on a train near Wuerzburg last Monday wounded five. A 17-year-old Afghan asylum-seeker was shot and killed by police as he fled the scene.
German media also reported Sunday that a man with a machete killed a woman and injured two others in the southwestern city of Reutlingen before being arrested by police. The reason for the attack in the city south of Stuttgart was unclear.
On Sunday, authorities said they were alerted to an explosion in Ansbach’s city’s center shortly after 10 p.m.
The three-day open-air concert was underway, with about 2,500 in attendance, when it was shut down as a precaution after the explosion. Jethro Tull frontman Ian Anderson was the scheduled performer.
Bavarian public broadcaster Bayerische Rundfunk reported that 200 police officers and 350 rescue personnel were brought in following the explosion in Ansbach.
The recent attacks in Bavaria, a picturesque, mountainous haven for travelers, came shortly after a Tunisian man driving a truck killed 84 people when he plowed through a festive crowd celebrating Bastille Day in Nice, along the famed French Riviera.
In Munich on Sunday evening, 1,500 people gathered at the scene of the shooting there, lighting candles and placing flowers in tribute to the victims of an 18-yearold German-Iranian. Police said that he had planned the attack for a year.
The young man behind the deadly shooting rampage in Munich was a withdrawn loner obsessed with playing “killer” video games in his bedroom, a victim of bullying who suffered from panic attacks set off by contact with other people, investigators said Sunday.
Law enforcement officials piecing together a portrait of the 18-year-old shooter said he was seeing a doctor up to last month for treatment of depression and psychiatric problems that began in 2015 with inpatient hospital care followed by outpatient visits.
They said medication for his problems had been found in his room. But toxicological and autopsy results were still not available, so it’s not yet clear whether he was taking the medicine when he went on his shooting rampage Friday, killing nine people and leaving dozens wounded.
The German-Iranian shooter, identified only as David S. due to Germany privacy laws, had earlier been described by investigators as being bullied by schoolmates at least once four years ago and being fascinated by previous mass shootings. But none of those killed was known to him, officials said.
After the Munich attack, Herrmann urged the German government to allow the country’s military to be deployed to support police during attacks. Germany’s postwar constitution, because of the excesses of the Nazi era, only allows the military to be deployed domestically in cases of national emergency.
Herrmann has called those regulations obsolete and said that Germans have a “right to safety.”
Back in January, Bavaria’s justice minister launched a state program in Ansbach meant to teach refugees the basics of law in their new host country, amid growing tensions and concerns in Germany about how it would integrate the estimated 1 millionplus migrants it registered crossing into the country last year. Classes include lessons about freedom of opinion, the separation of religion and state and the equality of men and women.
“Germany is an attractive country because it respects the dignity of every human being,” an educational film shown to newcomers said, “and it is supposed to stay that way.”