One person has been killed and another 11 injured after a suspected terror attack at a bar in the Bavarian city of Ansbach.
The unnamed bomber, reported locally as a 27-year-old Syrian refugee, was turned away from an open-air music festival filled with 2,500 people because he didn’t have a ticket.
Instead he walked to a bar in the centre of Ansback and detonated his bomb, said to be packed with metal fragments.
Bavaria’s top security official Joachim Herrmann said this morning that he believed the attacker was driven by “religious extremism”, adding: “My personal view is that I unfortunately think it’s very likely this really was an Islamist suicide attack.”
Bavarian police said in a statement: ‘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.”
Bavaria’s interior minister, Joachim Herrmann, said the suspect was a refugee whose application for asylum had been rejected, but he had been allowed to stay in Germany due to the Syrian civil war.
He had been living in Ansbach since July 2 and was known to the authorities after committing two offences. He had also tried to commit suicide twice, police said.
Germany is on edge after a deadly rampage at a Munich mall on Friday in which nine people were killed and an axe attack on a train near Wuerzburg last Monday in which five people were wounded.
#Ansbach attacker tried to commit suicide two times, was housed in a psychiatric hospital https://t.co/ZsZSAV6DJC pic.twitter.com/QzpZZqphvz
— RT (@RT_com) 25 July 2016
