News / Saudi Arabia / Germany

Saudi Arabia offers to help German investigators over July terror attacks: Report

Saturday, 06 August 2016 3:35 PM [ Last Update: Saturday, 06 August 2016 4:58 PM ]

Police officers talk at a crime scene in Ansbach, Germany, on July 25, 2016. ©AFP

Saudi Arabia has offered to assist Germany with investigating two terrorist attacks in July as attackers are found to have had contact with suspected members of the Daesh Takfiri terrorist group in the kingdom, a German news magazine says.

Citing a senior member of the Saudi government, Der Spiegel said Saturday that Riyadh wanted to help Germany find those behind bomb and axe attacks last month, which left 20 people injured and the two assailants dead. Daesh claimed responsibility for both attacks.

The report said that Saudi authorities are in contact with their German colleagues after new findings showed that both attackers had been in close contact via a chat conversation with possible supporters of the Daesh terror group in Saudi Arabia before the attacks.

“We want to jointly do everything possible to clarify the backgrounds of the attacks,” the unnamed Saudi official was quoted as saying.

Traces of the chats indicated that both men had not only been influenced by the unknown Daesh backers, but had even received instructions up until the attacks, the report said.

Police work at a site where a Syrian refugee set off an explosive device in Ansbach, southern Germany, on July 25, 2016. ©AFP

According to Spiegel, one of the attackers, a 17-year-old asylum seeker believed to come from either Afghanistan or Pakistan, had initially been told to drive a car into a crowd.

The attacker rejected the idea on the grounds, saying he didn't have a driver's license. Instead, he employed an axe to attack passengers on a train near the southern city of Wurzburg on July 18, seriously wounding five people before being shot dead by police.

On July 24, a 27-year-old Syrian refugee detonated his explosives in the city of Ansbach in Bavaria, killing himself and injuring 15 people.

Shortly before the attack took place, his chat contact had called on him to film the explosion and the resulting fire and send the film to Daesh, Spiegel said.

But the explosives detonated prematurely, killing the attacker and injuring 15 other people.

German federal prosecutors are investigating both attacks as terrorist crimes.

Bavaria's Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann said at the end of July that the Ansbach bomber had been “significantly influenced” in a chat conversation on his mobile phone that ended just before the attack.

Riyadh is widely viewed as one of the major supporters of Daesh which is mainly operating in Syria and Iraq.

Takfirism, which is the terrorist group’s trademark, is largely influenced by Wahhabism, the radical ideology dominating Saudi Arabia and freely preached by Saudi clerics.

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