Ansbach Bomber Pledged Allegiance to ISIS in Video
The bomber injured 15 people on Sunday in the German town.
— -- A suicide bomber who injured 15 people on Sunday evening in Ansbach, Germany, pledged allegiance to ISIS in a video found on his phone, according to Bavaria's top security official.
Joachim Herrmann, Bavaria's interior minister, told reporters that bomb making material was found in the apartment of the unnamed Syrian suspect. Canisters of diesel, hydrochloric acid, rubbing alcohol, soldering iron, wires, batteries, two cellphones and pebbles/stones were discovered by authorities as well as photos on the suspect's laptop glorifying ISIS violence.
Authorities said they're looking at the bomber's WhatsApp messages to find any possible links to accomplices and ISIS.
"The attack was carried out by a solider" who "executed the operation" in response to "calls to target" Western countries fighting ISIS, a source told Amaq, the official media arm for ISIS.
This attack was the fourth in a week in the German state of Bavaria, three of which were carried out by asylum seekers. On Monday, a 17-year-old asylum seeker attacked passengers on a commuter train with an axe and a knife, injuring five people. On Friday, a German-Iranian teenager killed nine people in a shooting in Munich. On Saturday, a Syrian refugee killed a woman and injured four others with a knife in the town of Reutlingen.
More than 60 percent of Germans have linked the increasing numbers of refugees in their country to a higher risk of terrorism, according to a Pew Research survey released earlier this month. And while only two of these attacks have officially been linked to radical Islamism, the German government's refugee policy is coming under intense scrutiny.
In the case of Sunday's suicide bomb in Ansbach that wounded dozens at a musical festival, the suspect was a Syrian refugee who had been denied asylum and had received a notice of deportation to Bulgaria.
Carla Seidel, the mayor of Ansbach, addressed Germany's policies toward immigrants after the recent attacks.
“There are a lot of people here just looking for shelter here in Germany, we’ll have to continue to provide a good example of how to do that here. We have a lot of projects here which help welcome newcomers to Ansbach, which are taken as good examples across Germany," she told ABC News.
German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere De Maiziere said he did not believe it had been too optimistic for Germany to accept 1.1 million refugees in 2015, according to German newspaper Deutsche Welle.
“The main problem,” he reportedly admitted, “was that there was no exhaustive, Europe-wide data base of radicalized, potential attackers.”
A total of 396,947 asylum applications were submitted in Germany in the first half of 2016, according to the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees. That's a 121.7 percent increase compared to the same period in 2015.
De Maiziere previously told reporters that authorities have investigated 59 allegations of migrants tied to terror groups. Today, the minister announced increased security presence at airports, train stations and elsewhere in the wake of these latest attacks but urged people not to panic. "We should continue to live our free lives," he said.
Europe has been on edge after a string of attacks in France and Belgium over the past year.