Alert raised after Ansbach bombing, the fourth bloody act of violence in the country in the space of a week

Germany will boost police presence at airports and train stations and carry out stop-and-search operations close to border areas, as residents were told to brace themselves for more acts of terrorism.

The warning was given after a Syrian asylum seeker blew himself up at the entrance to a music festival on Sunday night, the fourth bloody attack in a week.

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The Bavarian interior minister, Joachim Herrmann, said on Monday that the attacker had declared his support for the leader of Islamic State in a video found on his phone. An initial translation of the Arabic-language video showed the man announcing a “revenge” attack against Germany for “all the Muslims it has killed”.

“I think that after this video there is no doubt that the attack was a terrorist attack with an Islamist background,” he said.

Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office warned that it had 410 leads on possible terrorists currently in Germany.

On Sunday night, in the Bavarian town of Ansbach, the 27-year-old attacker, identified only as Mohammad D, whose asylum application had failed and was waiting deportation to Bulgaria, killed himself and injured 15 others, four seriously.

Hermann said officers discovered videos with “Salafist content” on storage devices seized at the man’s home, along with petrol, soldering bolts, batteries, chemicals and other material that could be used to make a bomb.

The Isis-linked Amaq news agency said on Monday that the attacker was “a soldier of the Islamic State” who had acted “in response to calls to target nations in the coalition” fighting the terrorist group. It offered no evidence to support the claim.

The attack took place two days after an 18-year-old German-Iranian gunman killed nine people in the Bavarian city of Munich and a week after a man attacked train passengers with an axe in Würzburg, also in Bavaria.

The three incidents have plunged the south-east German state – and the country as a whole – into an acute state of nervousness and prompted difficult questions about the extent to which the open-door policy of the chancellor, Angela Merkel, towards refugees last summer might be to blame.

In another incident on Sunday, a 21-year-old Syrian killed a pregnant Polish woman, 45, with a machete in Reutlingen, in the state of Baden-Württemberg. Police said there were no indications of terrorism and the attacker appeared to have known the woman he killed.

But extremism experts said even though the incident did not appear to have been politically motivated, it would only contribute to the increasingly common perception that refugees were a risk to ordinary Germans’ security.

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The German interior minister, Thomas de Maiziere, announced that the country will beef up its police presence at airports and train stations and carry out stop-and-search operations after the four attacks. “What seems particularly important to me at the moment is an increased police presence in public spaces,” De Maiziere told a news conference in Berlin.

De Maiziere defended Merkel’s refugee policy, pointing out that none of the suspects involved in the attacks in the past week were among the refugees who arrived last autumn after Merkel’s controversial declaration that Germany’s doors were open to those in need.

He said the perpetrator of the Ansbach attack had requested asylum in 2014. He had been due to be deported to Bulgaria – where he had already been offered refugee status – but the order was suspended after medical certificates were submitted that showed he had mental health problems. De Maiziere said that deportation proceedings recommenced on 13 July.

The Ansbach attack happened at around 10.10pm on Sunday outside a cafe, Eugen’s Weinstube, at the entrance to the Ansbach Open festival . The attacker had tried to enter the grounds but was turned back because he had no ticket. He immediately detonated the explosives in his rucksack.

Around 2,000 people were gathered for the concert. “Had he managed to get into the festival, there would certainly have been many more victims,” said Nuremberg’s deputy head of police, Roman Fertinger.

Daniel Sommer, a 39-year-old lawyer who lives on the square where the attack took place, told the Guardian he had invited friends and colleagues to watch the concert from the first floor of his house when the bomb went off.

“We were all looking out to the side of the square, when we suddenly heard a loud explosion that shook the house,” he said. “We rushed over to the other side of the house to see Eugen’s Weinstube and the beer garden in front of it. It smelled of gas after the explosion and we saw two chairs that were completely destroyed, a collapsed table and a man lying on the ground with a bare chest. The man was the suicide bomber.

“A woman spent 25 minutes trying to resuscitate him but she failed,” Sommer said.

Security guards calmly approached the concert crowd, gathered to hear popular singer Gregor Meyle and his band, most of whom had failed to hear the noise of the detonation over the loud music, and began to evacuate them. “They started at the back and row by row quietly ushered small groups out of the square, so as to avoid any panic,” Sommer said.



He added another friend saw the suicide bomber try several times to get into the square before he was turned away. “It was unclear whether they turned him away because he didn’t have a ticket or because he seemed to refuse to let them inspect his backpack.” The friend told Sommer he had “seen the man sit down and pull out his mobile phone, while nervously making a phone call. She later saw him fidget with his backpack. While she was inside the bar getting a drink, the bomb in the beer garden went off.”

Sommer later found a 4cm long aluminium plate that had been integrated into the bomb, which he handed to police.

The suspect was described by those who knew him as a withdrawn, inconspicuous man of short height with shoulder-length hair, and a short stubbly beard. He came from Aleppo. No one recalled noticing he had shown any signs of religious extremism.

Sylvia Bogenreuther, head of Sonnenzeit, a volunteer centre in Ansbach which organises integration courses, said she had known the man. “He looked harmless but kept himself to himself and even our Syrian volunteers found it difficult to relate to him,” she said.

But Sunday’s event, Bogenreuther said, would prompt her group to reassess their programmes. “We now plan to go through the lists of refugees in our region to see if there might be other loners who we should make an extra effort to integrate,” she said.

Farhan Mohamad, a 23-year-old refugee from Syria who had been in Ansbach since December 2014, said one of Mohammad D’s main problems was his lack of perspective in Germany, having been turned down for asylum. “He was denied asylum in Germany because his fingerprints had been taken in Bulgaria, and he had only obtained a temporary leave to remain in Germany,” he said.