Syrian bomber in ‘chat’ before attack

After mass shooting, police focus on ‘dark net’ crime

BERLIN, July 27, (Agencies): A Syrian with suspected links to the Islamic State group who blew himself up outside a German music festival was in contact with another person “who influenced the attack” immediately beforehand, authorities said Wednesday.

The 27-year-old failed asylumseeker, who wounded 15 people at a nearby cafe late Sunday when he was refused access to the festival venue, had been speaking to an unknown person in an “intensive” online chat, Bavaria state interior minister Joachim Herrmann said.

“Apparently he had direct contact with someone who had significant influence on the way the attack played out,” Herrmann was quoted by DPA news agency as saying on the sidelines of a state government meeting.

“The chat ended immediately before the attack.”

Herrmann said it was not immediately clear whether the unknown person had contact with Islamic State jihadists, where the chat participant was, or how long the two had been in contact.

Herrmann revealed on Monday that the attacker had made a video pledging allegiance to IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi that was found on his smartphone.

IS later said via the jihadist-linked Amaq news agency that the attacker “was a soldier of the Islamic State” who had acted “in response to calls to target nations in the coalition fighting” the extremists.

The assailant, who came to Germany two years ago but had his asylum claim rejected after a year, had tried to kill himself twice in the past and had spent time in a psychiatric clinic, authorities said.

Germany was already reeling after nine people were killed in a shopping centre shooting spree in Munich on Friday and four passengers on a train and a passer-by were wounded in an axe attack in Wuerzburg on July 18. IS also claimed the axe rampage. All three brutal incidents were in Bavaria, the southern state which has been a portal for tens of thousands of refugees under Chancellor Angela Merkel’s liberal asylum policy.

Blew

Meanwhile, the online magazine of the Islamic State group has described how a 27-year-old Syrian asylumseeker who blew himself up at a bar in the southern German town of Ansbach spent months planning the attack, once even hiding his home-made bomb in his room moments before a police raid.

The Ansbach attack was the last one of four attacks in the country in the span of a week, two of which have been claimed by the Islamic State extremist group.

The attacks have left Germany on edge and Chancellor Angela Merkel’s policies of welcoming refugees under renewed criticism.

Conservative lawmakers have called for an increased police presence, better surveillance and background checks of migrants and new strategies to deport criminal asylum seekers more easily.

Al Nabaa’s Arabic-language report on the attacker said he initially fought against government forces with alQaida’s branch in Syria before pledging alliance to IS in 2013.

He also helped the group with its propaganda efforts, setting up pro-IS accounts online.

In Germany he started making the bomb, a process that took him three months, al Nabaa wrote.

It added that German police once raided his asylum shelter in an unrelated case and searched Daleel’s room without noticing the bomb that he hid moments before the raid.

The IS group earlier claimed the Ansbach attack, publishing a video it said of Daleel pledging allegiance to the group and vowing that Germany’s people “won’t be able to sleep peacefully anymore.” It appears to be the same video as the one found by German investigators on the suicide bomber’s phone.

On Sunday, a 21-year-old Syrian used a machete to kill a 45-year-old Polish woman in the southern city of Reutlingen. Authorities said assailant and victim knew each other from working in the same restaurant, and the incident was not related to terrorism.

Despite the fact that not all the cases were terror-related, they have caused concerns about the government’s migration policy that saw more than 1 million people enter Germany last year.

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German police will do more to fight crime committed on the “dark net”, they said on Wednesday, days after a gunman killed nine people with a weapon bought on that hidden part of the internet .

“We see that the dark net is a growing trading place and therefore we need to prioritise our investigations here,” Holger Muench, head of Germany’s Federal Police (BKA), told journalists as he presented the latest annual report on cyber crime.

The dark net, which is only accessible via special web browsers, is increasingly used to procure drugs, weapons and counterfeit money, allowing users to trade anonymously and pay with digital currencies such as Bitcoin, the BKA said.

The man who killed nine people at a shopping mall in Munich on Friday was a local 18-year-old obsessed with mass killings who had bought his reactivated 9mm Glock 17 pistol on the dark web, Bavarian officials said.

The BKA said it had taken five market places in the dark net out of circulation last year. Muench said the BKA did not just want to take the sites offline but also catch criminals using them.

Cyber crime cost Germany 40.5 million euros ($44.5 million) last year, the BKA’s report said, a rise of 2.8 percent. Most of the more than 45,000 cases involved computer fraud.

Muench said the figures only represented a small part of the true size of cyber crime.

“If we look ahead we see little relief,” he said. “Cyber crime is still a growing phenomenon — you could say almost a growing business, even a growing industry.”