Twelve people have been injured, three seriously, after a Syrian suicide bomber blew himself up outside a music festival in southern Germany.
The bomber died instantly, leaving many others injured when the explosive device went off outside a wine bar in central Ansbach around 10pm last night (Sunday).
The 27-year-old is believed to have been refused asylum in the country in the last year, and had a history of attempting to take his own life.
According to Bavarian interior minister Joachim Herrmann “it’s very likely this really was an Islamist suicide attack”.
“The obvious intention to kill more people indicates an Islamist connection,” Mr Hermann told German news agency dpa.
According to Bavarian Police, the man had been walking in the area for a while and had stopped to sit at Eugene’s Wine Bar before he detonated the device. Police say he carried a backpack filled with screws, nails, and miscellaneous metal parts.
A police statement read:
“The person was a young man, who carried a backpack and walked up and down the area next to the entrance at the Pfarrstrasse for a long period of time.
“Afterwards he made his way to the outdoor seating area of a restaurant. At around 10.10pm an explosion happened there (at the restaurant), after the young man briefly bent forwards.”
2,500 people were evacuated from the Ansbach Open music festival after the attack, the fourth on German soil in the past week. Earlier yesterday, a man – also of Syrian origin – killed a pregnant woman with a machete in Reutlingen, outside Stuttgart.
Last Friday, a teenage gunman killed nine people in a mass shooting in Munich shopping centre, while last Monday, five people were wounded in an axe attack on a train near Wuerzburg.
