German authorities are under pressure to explain how a detained Syrian man suspected of planning an airport bombing attack was able to take his own life, with politicians demanding answers and calling the death in custody a “fiasco” and a “tragedy”.

Sebastian Gemkow, Saxony’s justice minister, said in a press conference in Dresden that Jaber al-Bakr, 22, strangled himself on Wednesday evening by tying his shirt to the bars of his jail cell.

“This should not have happened even though we did everything we could to prevent it,” Gemkow said on Thursday.

Earlier on Thursday, Bakr’s defence lawyer Alexander Huebner said that he had been informed his client was “under constant surveillance.

“How could this happen?” asked Huebner.

“I’m unbelievably shocked and absolutely speechless that something like this could have happened,” he said.

Rolf Jacob, the head of the prison where Bakr was held, told reporters that a trainee guard checked on the prisoner at 730pm on Wednesday, and that when he returned for another check 15 minutes later he found him dead.

Jacob said authorities who assessed him when he entered the prison had noted there was a suicide risk but did not consider it acute. He said the suspect was checked on every quarter of an hour and given pants without a belt as a precaution.

Read More: aljazeera