Wave of Violence Shakes Germany’s Calm Renewed debate over country’s open door to more than one million migrants in the past 20 monthsBy Ruth Bender and Anton Troianovski
http://www.wsj.com/articles/wave-of-violence-shakes-germanys-calm-1469448431
BERLIN—Four acts of violence in seven days have shattered Germany’s calm and revived an emotional debate over the security implications of taking in more than one million migrants and refugees in the past 20 months.
Police identified asylum applicants as suspects in three apparently unconnected high-profile attacks in the past week, from an ax attack on a train last week to a knife killing and a suicide blast late Sunday.
Only the ax rampage, in which a teenager registered as an Afghan refugee wounded five people, has been identified as Islamist terrorism. But all four incidents—including a German-Iranian teenager’s shooting spree in Munich on Friday that killed nine—have put the European Union’s most populous country on edge.
“I thought Germany was safe—no shooting, no terror,” said Faruk Sazil, a 30-year-old of Turkish origin, who owns and runs a Munich kebab stand next to the McDonald’s where the shooting spree began Friday. “Now I don’t know. Who can know?”
Authorities say the Munich shooter had been treated for depression and was obsessed by mass killings.
If confirmed by authorities as a suicide bombing motivated by Islamist extremism, Sunday evening’s attack by a Syrian man in the town of Ansbach, which wounded 12 people, would mark the first such attack in Germany in years. Unlike neighbors Belgium and France, Germany has recently escaped suicide bombings and other significant terror attacks.
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