German police union chief urges tightening refugees control after constant attacks

Control of refugees coming to Germany should be tightened in order to limit potential security risks, urged German police union chief Rainer Wendt on Monday, after constant attacks in southern Germany over the past week.

"Neither the identities of all people that have come to us, nor their mental and physical condition are clarified," criticized Wendt in an interview with German Hessischer Rundfunk radio.

"We experienced these days that mental instability, terrorism and crime mixed together," he said.

Wendt made the remarks after a 27-year-old Syrian man who has been denied asylum in Germany detonated a bomb at the entrance of a music festival in the southern German city of Ansbach on Sunday night.

No other people than the attacker was killed, but 12 others were injured, three of them seriously.

It was the fourth attack within a week in Germany and happened just hours after a 21-year-old Syrian refugee killed a pregnant woman and injured two people with a machete in Reutlingen, another city in the southern German state of Bavaria.

"It is more important that we not only accommodate and feed the people, but also determine who is coming to our country and see exactly whether they pose potential risks," Wendt said.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel was under increasing pressure from citizens for her welcoming policy which led to an influx of over one million refugees into Germany last year, most of them from the war-torn Middle East.

Earlier last week, a 17-year-old Afghan asylum-seeker attacked passengers with an axe on a train near Wuerzburg, wounding five people before being shot dead by police.

"Worries and anxieties of our population will increase," said Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann in a press conference early on Monday.

"We must do everything to ensure that such violence in our country from people who have come as asylum-seekers in our country will not run rampant," he added. Endi