Suicide Bomber Targets German Music Festival
In the German city of Ansbach last night, a suicide bomber killed himself and injured at least 12 other people, as The New York Times reports. The bomber had attempted to get into the Ansbach Open festival, a small festival with about 2,500 attendees, but he’d been denied entry. He’d carried a backpack bomb full of “small metal parts,” he he detonated it around 10PM.
Authorities say that the bomber was a 27-year-old Syrian immigrant who’d been denied asylum but who’d been allowed to stay in refugee housing in the city. He’d already attempted suicide twice. Bavarian interior minister Joachim Herrmann says, “We still don’t know whether the offender only wanted to commit suicide or whether it was his intention to kill other people as well.”
The blast came at the end of a week full of violence in Germany. It included a mass shooting at a shopping mall, which killed nine people, and an incident where an Afghan refugee attacked five people with an axe and a knife on a passenger train.