Syrian man died by his own bomb in Bavaria

MNA International Desk: A 27-year-old Syrian man died by his own bomb on Sunday when he set off it outside a crowded music festival in Bavaria. Police said 12 people were injured, including three seriously, in the attack in Ansbach, a small town of 40,000 people southwest of Nuremberg that is also home to a US Army base.

Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann told reporters at a quickly assembled news conference on Monday that it was unclear if the man had planned to commit suicide or “take others with him into death.”

Herrmann said that, the Syrian man came in Germany two years ago and had tried to commit suicide twice before. The man was holding a backpack filled with explosives and metallic parts that would have been enough to kill more people.

One US intelligence official said that detectives would focus on what the bomber was doing before he left Syria, why he was denied asylum, and whether the tried attack was individual or political.

Herrmann said the man had seemingly been denied entry to the Ansbach Open music festival shortly before the blast, which occurred outside a restaurant called Eugens Weinstube.

More than 2,000 people were exiled from the festival after the blast, police said. Alarge area around the blast site continued blocked off hours later.

Earlier on Sunday, a 21-year-old Syrian refugee was detained after killing a pregnant woman and hurting two people with a knife in the southwestern city of Reutlingen, near Stuttgart.

A refugee from Afghanistan using an axe injured five people near Wuerzbuerg, also in southern Germany, before he was shot dead by police a week ago. Islamic State claimed accountability for the July 18 axe attack in Wuerzbuerg.

Two days earlier, an 18-year-old man killed nine people in a firing outside a McDonald’s near a shopping centre in Munich, before then killing himself nearby.

After the Munich attack, Herrmann advised the German government to allow the country’s military to be deployed to help police during attacks. Germany’s post-war constitution only allows the military to be deployed nationally in cases of national crisis.