The shopping mall in the German northwestern city of Bremen was evacuated on Wednesday after the 19-year-old entered it with a large backpack and yelled "I’ll blow you up." No explosives were found at the mall, according to police.
Police said that the Algerian man had made statements sympathizing with the Munich gunman and extremists of the Islamic State (ISIL, also known as Daesh) terrorist group, banned in a range of states. The comments were reportedly made while the man was in custody last weekend for multiple thefts.
However, police said that they did not have any evidence proving that the man had ties to Daesh.
The man was put into psychiatric care at a facility in Diepholz, Lower Saxony, after he tried to hurt himself. Police were informed of his disappearance from the psychiatric hospital on Wednesday morning.
A wave of attacks has occurred in southern Germany in the past several days. On Sunday, an asylum-seeker from Syria blew himself up near an open-air music festival in Ansbach, a city in the state of Bavaria. He was earlier allegedly denied asylum application. The same day, another Syrian refugee killed a female colleague with a machete in the city of Reutlingen, near Stuttgart.
These attacks happened in the same week as the July 22 Munich mall shooting carried out by a German of Iranian origin, which left 9 killed, as well as a regional train axe attack carried out by an Afghan refugee, which injured 5.
