by WorldTribune Staff, July 25, 2016
Four violent attacks in the past week have Germans increasingly questioning the government’s taking in of over 1 million Middle Eastern migrants and refugees.
A Syrian asylum seeker who wounded 15 people when he detonated a bomb outside a music festival in Ansbach on July 25 had pledged allegiance to Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL), the Bavarian interior minister said.
Also on June 25, a 21-year-old Syrian refugee attacked and killed a pregnant woman and wounded two people with a machete in the southwestern city of Reutlingen, near Stuttgart.
“A provisional translation by an interpreter shows that he expressly announces, in the name of Allah, and testifying his allegiance to (Islamic State leader) Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi … an act of revenge against the Germans because they’re getting in the way of Islam,” Joachim Herrmann told a news conference.
“I think that after this video there’s no doubt that the attack was a terrorist attack with an Islamist background.”
The attack in Ansbach, a town of 40,000 people southwest of Nuremberg that has a U.S. Army base, was the fourth act of violence by men of Middle Eastern or Asian origin against German civilians in a week.
The ISIL bomber had been denied entry to the Ansbach Open music festival shortly before detonating the bomb outside a restaurant, Herrmann said. More than 2,000 people were evacuated from the festival after the explosion.
A week ago a 17-year-old youth who had sought asylum in Germany was shot dead by police after wounding five people with an ax near Wuerzburg, also in Bavaria. He was initially thought to be Afghan but federal Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere has since said he may have been from Pakistan.
De Maiziere said no decision would be made on changing asylum or immigration rules until investigations into the recent incidents are concluded.
“Of course I would and will initiate appropriate amendments if they are necessary or if I think they are necessary, but only then,” he said.
Germany’s federal and state security authorities have more than 400 leads on fighters or members of Islamist organizations among refugees in the country, the BKA federal police said.
New wave of migrant violence hits Germany in Ansbach and Stuttgart added by World Tribune on
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