Police officers secure the area after a bomb attack in Ansbach, Germany, Monday, July 25, 2016. Bavaria’s top security official says a man who blew himself up after being turned away from an open-air music festival in the southern German city was a 27-year-old Syrian who had been denied asylum. (AP Photo/Matthias Schrader)
(CNSNews.com) – A Syrian man whose application for asylum was denied a year ago was killed Sunday night when a bomb he was carrying in a backpack exploded outside the venue of a music festival in a small German city that is home to a U.S. Army base.
Twelve people were hurt, three of them seriously, in the blast in Ansbach, some 250 miles south of Berlin in the state of Bavaria.
Joachim Herrmann, the state’s interior minister, said the 27 year-old Syrian had evidently been refused entry to a music festival shortly before the explosion, and authorities could not rule out that it was a terror attack.
However he told the DPA news agency that it was his personal view the explosion was very likely an act of Islamist terrorism.
Herrmann said the man, who arrived in Germany two years ago, was refused refugee status but allowed to remain because of the civil war raging in his homeland. He was known to the police, and had attempted suicide in the past, he said.
Several thousand people were evacuated from the Ansbach Open music festival after the explosion, which came just two days after an Iranian-German shot dead nine people in the Bavarian state capital, Munich. State police said on Saturday the shooter was neither a refugee nor known to have terror links, but had been receiving psychiatric treatment.
In yet another violent attack, a 21-year-old Syrian refugee was arrested in a city near Stuttgart on Sunday after killing a pregnant woman and injuring two other people with a machete. The man was arrested after a driver, seeing him trying to flee, ran him down with his car, DPA quoted a police spokesman as saying.
And last Monday, a 17-year-old refugee from Pakistan (originally thought to have been Afghan) was shot dead by police after injuring five people with an ax on a commuter train in southern Germany. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS/ISIL) claimed responsibility for the ax attack.
Ansbach is home to a U.S. Army Garrison, with the 12th Combat Aviation Brigade located at the Katterbach Army Airfield just outside the city. The base reported an “incident in downtown Ansbach” that led to parts of the city being evacuated.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has been under fire over an open door migration/refugee policy that saw more than one million migrants arrive in 2015, the largest influx in Germany’s history.
Concerns about that policy are seen as having contributed to the surge in support for the right wing populist Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) party, now one of the country’s fastest growing political parties, with representatives elected to half of the nation’s state parliaments.
Police officers secure the area after a bomb attack in Ansbach, Germany, Monday, July 25, 2016. Bavaria’s top security official says a man who blew himself up after being turned away from an open-air music festival in the southern German city was a 27-year-old Syrian who had been denied asylum. (AP Photo/Matthias Schrader) 
