A 27-year-old Syrian man denied asylum in Germany a year ago died on Sunday (July 24) when he set off a bomb outside a crowded music festival in Bavaria, the fourth violent attack in Germany in less than a week, a senior Bavarian state official said. <br /> <br />Police said 12 people were wounded, including three seriously, in the attack in Ansbach, a small town of 40,000 people southwest of Nuremberg that is also home to a U.S. Army base. <br /> <br />The incident will add to growing public unease surrounding Chancellor Angela Merkel's open-door refugee policy, under which more than a million migrants have entered Germany over the past year, many fleeing wars in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq. <br /> <br />Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann told reporters at a hastily convened news conference on Monday that it was unclear if the man had planned to commit suicide or "take others with him into death", according to news website Nordbayern.de. <br /> <br />Herrmann, whose remarks were confirmed by a ministry spokesman, said the Syrian man arrived in Germany two years ago and had tried to commit suicide twice before. <br /> <br />The man was carrying a backpack filled with explosives and metal parts that would have been sufficient to kill more people, Herrmann said. He said he could not exclude the possibility of an Islamist-inspired attack, but said that would have to be confirmed by an investigation. <br /> <br />Herrmann said the man had apparently been denied entry to the Ansbach Open music festival shortly before the explosion, which happened outside a restaurant called Eugens Weinstube. <br /> <br />More than 2,000 people were evacuated from the festival after the explosion, police said. A large area around the blast site remained blocked off hours later. <br /> <br />It was the fourth violent incident in Germany in a week, including the killing of nine people by an 18-year-old Iranian-German gunman in Munich on Friday. <br /> <br />Earlier on Sunday, a 21-year-old Syrian refugee was arrested after killing a pregnant woman and wounding two people with a machete in the southwestern city of Reutlingen, near Stuttgart. <br /> <br />A refugee from Pakistan wielding an axe wounded five people near Wuerzbuerg, also in southern Germany, before he was shot dead by police a week ago. <br /> <br />Police said neither Sunday's machete attack nor Friday's shooting in Munich bore any sign of connections with Islamic State or other militant groups. <br /> <br />Islamic State claimed responsibility for the July 18 axe attack in Wuerzbuerg. The group also claimed responsibility for the July 14 attack France, in which a Tunisian man drove a truck into Bastille Day holiday crowds in the French Riviera city of Nice, killing 84 people.
