Germany on edge following attacks
Spate of violence threatens to revive debate over Merkel’s refugee policy
BERLIN— Germany was put on edge after an unprecedented series of four attacks in the past week left many dead and wounded, placing pressure on German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government to stem the violence.
The latest incident occurred late Sunday at a music festival in the Bavarian town of Ansbach, near Nuremberg, when a 27-year-old man identified as a Syrian refugee blew himself up near the entrance to the event, injuring 12 others.
The bombing followed a shooting spree at a shopping centre in Munich on Friday, in which an 18-year-old man shot dead nine people before killing himself. The attacker, identified as an Iranian-German who was born and raised in Germany, had no apparent connection with a terror organization, police said. In another assault on Sunday, a machete-wielding 21-year-old male, also identified as Syrian refugee, killed a pregnant woman in a town south of Stuttgart. Last Monday, an axe assault by an Afghan asylum seeker allegedly in- spired by Daesh, also known as ISIS and ISIL, wounded two train passengers near Wurzburg.
Stephan Mayer, a lawmaker in Merkel’s Christian Democratic-led bloc, urged calm and warned against hasty judgments, particularly over the chancellor’s refugee policy, which triggered public anxiety after more than a million migrants made their way to Germany in 2015.
“There is a rising nervousness among our public. . . . It is completely wrong to blame Angela Merkel and her refugee policy for this incident,” Mayer, who sits on parliament’s internal affairs committee, told BBC Radio on Monday.
Germany has avoided large-scale terrorist attacks, in contrast with the assaults that killed hundreds in Paris, Brussels and Nice over the past year. While the spate of violence in Germany is smaller, the incidents could revive pressure on Merkel over her migration policy as she struggles to confront crises buffeting Europe.
Merkel convened an emergency meeting of her security cabinet on Saturday. Anxieties over the influx of asylum seekers, the vast majority arriving through Bavaria, had subsided as numbers dwindled, the result of border closings along the Balkan route and a European Union accord with Turkey.