BERLIN—A 17-year-old Afghan migrant wielding a hatchet and a knife injured four people on a train in Würzburg, Germany, Monday evening before being shot dead by police, the authorities said.

(Article by Anton Troianovski)

Police were investigating a witness report that the attacker made an Islamist exclamation, Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann said on German television. If confirmed, the incident would represent the most significant Islamist attack in Germany since a Kosovar gunman killed two American servicemen in 2011.

Three of the victims were seriously injured, officials said.

The attacker was believed to be a 17-year-old man from Afghanistan who came to Germany as a refugee, Mr. Herrmann said in television interviews.

“I am appalled about this,” Mr. Herrmann said. “He injured a number of people, slashing around himself with a hatchet and a knife.”

Mr. Herrmann said that one witness reported hearing the attacker shout “Allahu akbar,” or “God is great.” However, other passengers on the train, he said, didn’t recognize “any particular Islamist motive” to the attack.
Unlike France and Belgium, Germany has avoided deadly Islamic State-inspired attacks even as authorities have warned that the stream of refugees and other migrants that have poured into the country presented a security risk. Roughly a million people arrived in Germany last year to request asylum, many of them from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.

The attack is likely to add fuel to an intense debate across Europe on immigration, Islam and how to respond to the wave of people from the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere seeking refuge on the continent. While Germany initially welcomed hundreds of thousands of people last fall, Chancellor Angela Merkel has since scrambled to limit the flow.

Critics and political opponents said she underplayed the risks of taking in so many refugees, including the possibility that terrorist groups could smuggle in attackers amid the flow of people. Other officials counter that radicalized European Union citizens present the much greater terrorism risk.

While many of the people behind recent terrorist acts in Europe have been EU citizens, two of the attackers in November’s Paris attacks arrived within the stream of refugees coming to Europe, according to the authorities.

Anti-immigrant populist parties in France, Austria, the Netherlands and elsewhere have seized on the migrant influx to argue that their countries’ mainstream politicians are out of touch with people’s fears.

In Germany, the upstart Alternative for Germany party has posted a string of regional election victories in the past year, seizing on the sexual assaults by migrants in Cologne on New Year’s Eve as proof that Ms. Merkel’s policy was endangering the country. The Cologne assaults, in which authorities said at least 2,000 mostly foreign men assaulted more than 1,200 women, raised fears among Germans about taking in more migrants.

Monday’s attack occurred on an evening regional train traveling along the Main River from the town of Ochsenfurt to Würzburg. After the attack began, a passenger pulled the train’s emergency brake, and the suspect fled, Mr. Herrmann said.

A tactical police commando unit that happened to be in the area was called to the scene and intercepted the suspect, Mr. Herrmann said. The man then attacked the police, prompting officers to open fire, killing him, Mr. Herrmann said.

The suspected attacker came to Germany as an unaccompanied minor and had been living in the Würzburg area “for some time,” Mr. Herrmann said, and moved two weeks ago from a shelter in Ochsenfurt to a foster home.

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