Merkel: Germany ‘will manage’ challenge after attacks

Five attacks in Germany since July 18 have left 15 people dead, including four assailants, and dozens injured.

Merkel has also received criticism for being on holiday during the recent attacks, and for not responding to the attacks as quickly as foreign leaders such as President Obama or French President Francois Hollande.

Merkel repeated unbidden her insistence that Germany “will manage” the challenges of the day – a phrase she first used at last summer’s annual news conference. She added that Germany owes that to the victims, their relatives, its own security and also “to all the many innocent refugees”.

The public BNT channel, which interviewed Daleel at a Sofia refugee shelter in September and November 2013, has aired the interviews again following Sunday’s attack in Ansbach in southern Germany. “It mocks the helpers who took so much care of the refugees and it mocks the many other refugees who really seek help against violence and war”.

Merkel said that Germany will do “everything humanly possible” to ensure security, though there will have to be a “thorough analysis” before specific new measures are drawn up. Both of the attackers, asylum-seekers who arrived over the past two years, were killed.

Daleel died and 15 people were wounded when the bomb exploded in a wine bar Sunday night after he wasn’t allowed entry to a nearby open-air concert because he didn’t have a ticket.

Herrmann said it was not immediately clear whether the unknown person had contact with ISIS jihadists, where the chat participant was, or how long the two had been in contact.

It showed a gaunt, long-haired man in a red checked shirt who pulled up the leg of his jeans to show what he said were shrapnel scars on his legs.

“The attacker evidently had direct contact in an online chat to someone who had significant influence over the terrorist plot”, Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Hermann said on the sidelines of a meeting of the state government.

Bavarian interior minister Joachim Herrmann said his state – where three of the four attacks took place – would hire 2,000 extra police officers until 2020, improve police equipment and create new offices to fight Muslim extremism and cybercrime.

The Ansbach attack was the last one of four attacks in the country in the span of a week, two of which have been claimed by the Islamic State extremist group.

The Ansbach suicide bomber had fought with a jihadist group in Syria before seeking asylum in Germany, it emerged yesterday (Wednesday), raising fresh questions about the country’s screening of migrants.

The proposals, to be discussed in a five-day meeting, include calls for increased police presence and tighter controls on refugees, such as expiating the deportation process of rejected asylum seekers.

The online magazine of the Islamic State group has described how a 27-year-old Syrian asylum-seeker who blew himself up at a bar in the southern German town of Ansbach spent months planning the attack, once even hiding his home-made bomb in his room moments before a police raid.

He also called for tougher background checks on asylum-seekers and new strategies to deport criminal asylum-seekers more easily.

He argued that “the right of asylum for Muslims should be suspended immediately until all applicants residing in Germany are registered, monitored and their applications are processed”.