Bavaria is reeling from its fourth bloody attack in a week after a 27-year-old Syrian refugee blew himself up at a music festival in Ansbach, near Nuremberg.
The attack in the southern German state took place shortly after 10pm local time, killed the bomber and left 12 others seriously injured.
According to eye-witness reports the man tried to enter the festival without a ticket and, when he was refused entry, detonated explosives he was carrying in a rucksack.
The festival, attended by 2,500 people, was immediately cancelled and the scene cleared to allow an investigation to begin.
So far no organisation has linked itself to the attack but Mr Joachim Hermann, interior minister of Bavaria, said it was his “personal assessment ... that we’re likely to be dealing with a real Islamist suicide attack”.
“The perpetrator had a rucksack with explosives and also sharp metal pieces were inside, designed to injure as many people in the radius of the bomb,” he said.
Police said the intent of the bomber was not just to kill himself, but to cause as much injury as possible.
But after facing pressure to react quickly twice before in the last week, other politicians have been cautious about jumping to conclusions.
One eye witness told Germany’s Sat-1 television how he heard a loud bang while a band was playing.
“A security man ran to the entrance, two people lay on the ground with head and throat injuries,” said Kevin Krieger. “I tried to calm them, the police cleared the area, nobody shouted ... It was like an explosion, really loud, you could feel it on your whole body.”
At first police in the Baroque city of Ansbach, anxious not to stir up already unstelled public, spoke of a gas explosion.
But at a press conference at 3am, police admitted that they “can’t rule out that it was a radical extremist, though there is no evidence of this”.
Despite his failed asylum application the man was still living in Germany because, given the civil war in Syria, authorities do not send people back there except if they are involved in serious crimes.
A week ago a 17 year-old refugee believed to be from Afghanistan launched an axe and knife attack on passengers on a regional train nearby in Würzburg, an attack later claimed by ISIS.
Last Friday, an 18-year-old gunman shot dead nine people and left over 30 injured before taking his own life near a Munich shopping centre.. The attack had no political links.
On Sunday a Syrian asylum-seeker killed a woman and injured two others with a machete in Reutlingen, near Stuttgart.
Bavarian authorities say this latest attack was carried out by a 27-year-old Syrian man who came to Germany two years ago but whose asylum application was rejected last year but had yet to be deported.
“He’s tried twice already to take his life and, as a result, was in a psychiatric facility,” said Mr Hermann.
After concluding their forensic search of the attack scene, police this morning raided a local refugee facility where the man lived for a time.
As Germany wakes up to its fourth bloody attack in a week, senior police officials said it was important that “politicians hold their nerve and not stir up rumours”.
“It’s important all invesigations are concluded calmly and professionally,” said Mr Rainer Wendt, head of Germany’s police union.
“Nothing can be covered up but nothing should be exaggerated, the population must be kept calm.”
The bloody attacks have sparked a debate in Germany about whether the country, with the world’s fourth biggest gun ownership per capita, needs tighter weapons on owning weapons.
And the Bavarian state government, rattled by its fourth bloody attack in seven days, has floated the idea of ending post-war restrictions on domestic deployments of the Germany army, the Bundeswehr.
Germany’s post-war constitution allows for military domestic deployments only in limited cases, such as to assist in the case of natural disasters.
But Mr Hermann, Bavaria’s interior minister, suggested the time had come to review limits imposed to prevent a repeat of military abuses during the Nazi era.
“We have an absolutely stable democracy,” he said. “It would be absolutely incomprehensible ... If we had a terrorist situation like Brussels in Frankfurt, Stuttgart or Munich and were not permitted to call in the well-trained forces of the Bundeswehr, even though they are standing ready.”
His remarks to the Welt am Sonntag newspaper were made after Monday’s axe attack but before Friday’s shooting in Munich.
Even with a rising fear of Islamist violence in Germany, however, many German politicians rushed to criticise the remarks.
Some suggested it would only be permissible to allow domestic army deployments if they took place under police, and not military, command.