Berlin: Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere on Monday cautioned Germans against indiscriminately branding all refugees a security threat after a rash of attacks over the last week.

“We must not place refugees under general suspicion despite individual cases that are under investigation,” he said in an interview with the Funke media group after a string of assaults in southern Germany, some involving asylum seekers.

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s deputy spokeswoman Ulrike Demmer later expressed the government’s “shock” after the rash of violence over the last week but also warned against labelling all refugees.

“Most of the terrorists who carried out attacks in recent months in Europe were not refugees,” she said.

“This fact corresponds with ongoing investigations indicating that the terrorism threat [among refugees] is not larger or smaller than in the population at large.”

Authorities said a man who set off a bomb late Sunday near a music festival in the southern town of Ansbach, killing himself and wounding a dozen others, was believed to be a 27-year-old Syrian refugee.

He was facing imminent deportation to Bulgaria, where he was first registered as an asylum seeker, an interior ministry spokesman said.

Regional officials had said a Islamist motive was “very likely” but a spokesman for the federal interior ministry said there was as yet “no credible evidence” of a link to Islamist extremism.

Earlier in the day, a Syrian refugee, 21, had killed a 45-year-old Polish woman with a large kebab knife in the southwestern city of Reutlingen in what police said was likely a “crime of passion”.

Reports on Monday said that the 16-year-old Afghan youth who was arrested on Sunday had been in contact via WhatsApp with an 18-year-old gunman who killed nine people in Munich two days earlier and also met him just before the attack, Bavarian officials said.

The youth, who was questioned after he contacted police following the shooting, is under investigation for possibly having failed to report the plans of the gunman.

Thomas Steinkraus-Koch, senior public prosecutor in Munich, told a news conference on Monday the Afghan had been in contact with the gunman via WhatApp until shortly before the attack. He wiped the conversation, but officials were able to retrieve it.

 

Open-door refugee policy

 

“This [WhatsApp] chat and questioning of a suspect has shown that the Afghan met the gunman directly before the gun attack at what was later the scene of the crime,” Steinkraus-Koch told a news conference in Munich.

The shooting was one of four attacks in Germany — three of them by migrants — since July 18 that have left 10 people dead and 34 injured, a toll that may heighten public disquiet over Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open-door refugee policy.

More than a million migrants have entered Germany over the past year, many fleeing war in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq.

The WhatsApp chat showed the Afghan knew the German-Iranian gunman was in possession of a Glock 17 firearm, Steinkraus-Koch said. “They got to know each other last summer, in 2015, in a psychiatric clinic where they underwent treatment,” he said.

“There, it also became apparent to the [Afghan] suspect that the attacker was interested in Breivik,” Steinkraus-Koch added, referring to Anders Breivik, who killed 77 people in back-to-back attacks in Norway in 2011.

The Afghan’s decision to delete his WhatsApp chat with the gunman and their meeting just before the Munich attack led investigators to suspect he knew of the planned shooting in advance.

“We will now pursue this suspicion,” Steinkraus-Koch said.