ANSBACH EXPLOSION: SYRIAN ASYLUM SEEKER BLOWS HIMSELF UP IN GERMANY.

A failed Syrian asylum seeker has blown himself up and injured 12 other people with a backpack bomb near a festival in the south German town of Ansbach.

The 27-year-old man, who faced deportation to Bulgaria, detonated the device after being refused entry to the music festival, Bavarian officials say. About 2,500 people were evacuated from the venue after the explosion.

Bavaria has been on edge since a knife rampage on a train claimed by so-called Islamic State (IS) last Monday.



The Ansbach blast is reported to have happened at about 22:10 (20:10 GMT) outside the Eugens Weinstube bar in the centre of the town, which has a population of 40,000 and is home to a US military base. The bomb went off close to the entrance to the Ansbach Open music festival.
A witness, Thomas Debinski, reported "panic" after the explosion, although some people had thought it was caused by a gas explosion.


"Then people came past and said it was a rucksack that had exploded," he told Sky News.

Three of the injured were in a serious condition, police said.
Security services have sealed off the city centre and experts are trying to establish the kind of explosives the bomber used.

In other developments

• The mayor of Munich, Dieter Reiter, suggested backpacks might be banned from the Oktoberfest beer festival as a security precaution
• An Afghan teenager arrested by Munich police met gunman David Sonboly shortly before he killed nine people and knew that he had a gun, German police say
• An MP from Chancellor Merkel's party, Stephan Mayer, called for Germany to regain control over its own borders but insisted it was wrong to blame "Angela Merkel and her refugee policy" for last week's violence

Seven deadly days

A week of bloody attacks has frayed nerves in Germany, which led the way in accepting asylum seekers from Syria. To date, only the first has been linked to a militant group:

• 18 July: An axe-wielding teenage asylum seeker from Afghanistan is shot dead after injuring five people in an attack on a train. IS claims the attack, releasing a video recorded by the attacker before the incident

• 22 July: A German teenager of Iranian extraction goes on a shooting rampage in the Bavarian state capital, Munich, killing nine people, most of them migrants, before shooting himself. He is said to have been obsessed with school shootings

• 24 July: A Syrian asylum seeker is arrested in the town of Reutlingen, Baden-Wuerttemberg, after allegedly killing a Polish woman with a machete and injuring two other people. Police suggest it was probably a "crime of passion"

• 24 July: A failed Syrian asylum seeker blows himself up outside a music festival in the small Bavarian town of Ansbach, injuring 12 other people. Motive not immediately clear