Merkel rules out migrant policy reversal after attacks

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has defended her policies on refugees in the wake of recent terror attacks.

Some of the attacks were by asylum seekers who she said had "shamed the country that welcomed them".

She said those fleeing persecution and war had a right to be protected.

Mrs Merkel proposed new measures on information sharing, deciphering web chatter, tackling arms sales on the internet and improving security responses to attacks.

Two recent attacks in Bavaria were both by asylum seekers. A suicide bomb attack in Ansbach on Sunday that injured 15 people was carried out by a Syrian who had been denied asylum but given temporary leave to stay.

An axe and knife attack on a train in Wuerzburg on 18 July was carried out by an asylum seeker from Afghanistan.

Both men had claimed allegiance to so-called Islamic State.

The deadliest attack - in Munich on 22 July which left nine dead - was carried out by a German teenager of Iranian extraction but was not jihadist-related.

Mrs Merkel said Germany would "stick to our principles" in giving shelter to the deserving.

She said the attacks had shown the "taboos of civilisation" had been broken.

The attacks in Germany, along with those recently in Nice and Rouen in France, were intended to "spread fear and hatred between cultures and between religions", Mrs Merkel said.

Speaking in Berlin, Mrs Merkel said that "besides organised terrorist attacks, there will be new threats from perpetrators not known to security personnel".

To counter this, she said: "We need an early alert system so that authorities can see during the asylum request proceedings where there are problems."

Mrs Merkel added: "We will take the necessary measures and ensure security for our citizens. We will take the challenge of integration very seriously."

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Seven deadly days

A week of bloody attacks has frayed nerves in Germany, which led the way in accepting asylum seekers from Syria. To date, two of the attacks have been linked to a militant group:

• 18 July: An axe-wielding teenage asylum seeker from Afghanistan is shot dead after injuring five people in an attack on a train. IS claims the attack, releasing a video recorded by the attacker before the incident

• 22 July: A German teenager of Iranian extraction goes on a shooting rampage in the Bavarian state capital, Munich, killing nine people, most of them migrants, before shooting himself. He is said to have been obsessed with school shootings

• 24 July: A Syrian asylum seeker is arrested in the town of Reutlingen, Baden-Wuerttemberg, after allegedly killing a Polish woman with a machete and injuring two other people. Police suggest it was probably a "crime of passion"

• 24 July: A failed Syrian asylum seeker blows himself up outside a music festival in the small Bavarian town of Ansbach, injuring 15 other people.