German minister: Bomber was in online chat before attack
BERLIN — A 27-yearold Syrian asylum-seeker who blew himself up in the southern German town of Ansbach was chatting online with a still-unidentified person immediately before the explosion, Bavaria’s interior minister said Wednesday.
Attacker Mohammed Daleel died and 15 people were wounded when his bomb exploded outside a wine bar Sunday night after he was denied entry to a nearby open-air concert because he didn’t have a ticket.
“There was apparently an immediate contact with someone who had a significant influence on this attack,” state Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann said during a break at a party meeting in Bavaria.
It wasn’t clear whether Daleel was in contact with the Islamic State group or where the other person in the chat was, Herrmann said. He said investigators checking the assailant’s cellphone came across the “intensive chat” and that “the chat appears to end immediately before the attack.”
On Tuesday night, the online magazine of the Islamic State group said the attacker spent months planning the attack, once even hiding his homemade bomb in his room in a state-supported asylum shelter moments before a police raid.
The weekly Al-Nabaa magazine’s report added that Daleel fought in Iraq and Syria with a branch of al-Qaida and the Islamic State group before arriving in Germany as an asylumseeker two years ago.
Herrmann said a roll of 50-euro notes was found on the attacker. It’s unclear where the money came from — but it is “unlikely that it could have been paid for solely from what an asylum-seeker in Germany gets in the way of pocket money.” He didn’t disclose the total value of the cash.