Germany: Investigation indicates train attacker acted alone

A 17-year-old Afghan asylum-seeker was shot and killed by police after wounding five in an axe-and-knife attack, four of whom were from Hong Kong.

Herrmann said it was too early to conclude what the attacker’s motives have have been and that notes written in Pashtun found in his room appeared to suggest that he may have been self-radicalized.

A teenager who attacked passengers with an ax on a German commuter train seems to have acted alone and had no direct connections to the Islamic State, Germany’s top law enforcement official said Wednesday. Reports say that the suspect shouted “Allahu Akbar”, an Arabic term for “God is greatest”, before committing the attack.

Herrmann said investigators were still looking into the evidence found in the teenager’s room, including what could be farewell letter to his father.

It happened around 9:15pm (1915 GMT) on the train carrying around 25 people running between the town of Treuchtlingen and Wuerzburg in Bavaria, southern Germany.

Wuerzburg police said on their Facebook page that three of the victims suffered serious injuries and one was slightly injured.

Fourteen other passengers on the train were being treated for shock.

The attack took place days after a Tunisian delivery man ploughed a truck into crowds of Bastille Day revellers in the southern French city of Nice, killing 84.

Ambulances scrambled to the scene of an attack on Monday in Germany where an Afghan man wounded several people with an axe.

Soon after German authorities said they found the IS flag among Riaz A.’s belongings, the Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the attack and said he was one of its “fighters”, an IS-linked news agency said. “The video does not contain any indications as to whether there was an order from ISIS”, he said, adding that there was no indication when the video was made, CNN reported.

He was a Sunni Muslim who didn’t go to the mosque regularly, but prayed regularly at home, and had not committed any previous crimes in Germany Koehler said.

“Originally, the assailant was attacking my sister’s boyfriend and when my mother and father saw, they went up to get in the way and then they got injured”, their elder daughter, Sylvia, 30, told the Apple Daily of Hong Kong.

Authorities have said a 15-year-old girl who attacked a police officer in a Hanover train station, stabbing him in the neck with a kitchen knife, was inspired by Islamic State internet propaganda.

Authorities have not released the attacker’s name publicly because he was a minor.

German prosecutors said they are working to confirm the identity of the youth featured in the video.

De Maiziere, a close ally of Chancellor Angela Merkel, defended the government’s migration policy, which came under strain previous year as the country took in more than 1 million migrants fleeing conflict and poverty in the Middle East. He said it’s right to have legal channels for migration alongside measures to reduce the influx.