A failed Syrian asylum seeker has blown himself up and injured 15 other people with a backpack bomb near a festival in the south German town of Ansbach.
The 27-year-old man, who faced deportation to Bulgaria, detonated the device after being refused entry to the music festival, Bavarian officials say.
About 2,500 people were evacuated from the venue after the explosion.
It is the third violent attack in Bavaria in a week. The state’s premier described it as “days of horror”.
Bavaria has been on edge since a knife attack on a train last week that so-called Islamic State (IS) said it was behind. On Friday a gun attack killed nine in Munich. The Ansbach blast took place at 22:10 (20:10 GMT) on Sunday evening, outside the Eugens Weinstube bar in the centre of the town, which has a population of 40,000 and is home to a US military base. The bomb went off close to the entrance to the Ansbach Open music festival.
A witness, Thomas Debinski, reported “panic” after the explosion, although some people had thought it was caused by a gas explosion. “Then people came past and said it was a rucksack that had exploded,” he told Sky News.
The town’s mayor, Carla Seidel, confirmed that there were 15 injured, four of them in a serious condition.
Security services have sealed off the city centre and experts are trying to establish the kind of explosives the bomber used. The Syrian man entered Germany two years ago and had his asylum claim rejected a year ago, Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann said.
He had been given leave to stay temporarily given the situation in his home country and provided with accommodation in Ansbach, Mr Herrmann added.
A federal interior ministry spokesman, Tobias Plate, confirmed the man had faced deportation to Bulgaria.
“Syrians cannot at the moment be deported to Syria, but that doesn’t mean that Syrians overall cannot be deported,” he told reporters in Berlin.
Mr Herrmann said he was “incensed” by the attack which, he continued, demonstrated the need to “strengthen controls on those we have living in our country”.
Germany has been the main destination of Syrian asylum seekers entering the EU, most of them arriving irregularly in Greece via Turkey.
Only 23 Syrians had their applications for asylum rejected by the country last year, out of a total of 105,620 decisions on Syrians’ applications. A common reason for rejecting an application is when the asylum seeker submits false or incomplete information. Just under half of asylum seekers rejected by Germany in the past two years were allowed to stay on in the country, according to a recent report in German daily Die Welt (in German). The Ansbach bomber, who was among those rejected for asylum in 2015, appears to have been placed in a former hotel in the town, designated by the municipal authorities for asylum seekers since 2014.
Ansbach deputy police chief Roman Fertinger said there were “indications” that pieces of metal had been added to the explosive device. “The obvious intention to kill more people indicates an Islamist connection,” Mr Hermann said. Mr Herrmann said the man had been known to have tried to take his own life twice and had spent time in a psychiatric clinic. “We don’t know if this man planned on suicide or if he had the intention of killing others,” he said.
A resident of the former Ansbach hotel where the bomber had lived, Alireza Khodadadi, told the Associated Press news agency that he had occasionally drunk coffee with the Syrian, whom he named only as Mohammed, and they had discussed religion.
Mohammed, he said, told him IS was not representative of Islam: “He always said that, ‘No, I’m not with them, I don’t like them and such stuff.’
“But I think he had some issues because, you know, he told lies so often without any reason, and I understand that he wants to be in the centre of [attention], you know, he needed [attention],” Mr Khodadadi added.
