The Commercial Appeal

GERMANY ON EDGE:

12 people injured after man detonates suicide bomb in Bavaria.

- By Hakan Kaplan and David Rising

BERLIN — A man who blew himself up and injured 12 people Sunday night after being turned away from an open-air music festival was a 27-year-old Syrian who had been denied asylum, Bavaria’s top security official said.

“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 unstable situation in Syria, where civil war has been raging for several years.

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 in the southern German state came just two days after a man went on a deadly rampage at a Munich shopping center, killing nine people, and after an ax attack on a train near Wuerzburg last Monday wounded five.

Authoritie­s said that they were alerted to an explosion in the city’s center shortly after 10 p.m. Sunday.

The open-air concert with about 2,500 in attendance was shut down as a precaution after the explosion.

Germany, and Bavaria in particular, have been on edge following the attacks in Munich and on the train, which in turn came shortly after a Tunisian man in a truck killed 84 people when he plowed through a festive crowd celebratin­g Bastille Day in Nice, on the French Riviera.

Bavarian public broadcaste­r Bayerische Rundfunk reported that about 200 police officers and 350 rescue personnel were brought in following the explosion in Ansbach.

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