Germany Foils `Massive' Bomb Attack, Prosecutor Says (Update2)
By Brian Parkin and Claudia Rach
Sept. 5 (Bloomberg) -- German police arrested three people suspected of planning ``massive'' terrorist attacks on U.S. and other targets in the country, preventing the deaths of ``many, many people,'' the Chief Federal Prosecutor Monika Harms said.
The suspects, two Germans and a Turkish national, were arrested yesterday at a house in Oberschledorn, a village in the western state of North-Rhine Westphalia, officials said. Bomb- making materials and military detonators were also seized. The trio are alleged members of a local cell of the Islamist terrorist organization Jihad Union, which has links to al-Qaeda, Harms told reporters in the southern city of Karlsruhe today.
Police foiled ``one of the worst terror acts ever planned in Germany,'' Harms said. ``We've said repeatedly for months that Germany is in the sights of Islamist terrorism and that we have to be vigilant.''
The alleged terrorists planned attacks on sites in Germany frequented by U.S. citizens among others, including discos, bars and transport facilities, Harms said. The peroxide-based liquid explosives seized were equivalent to 550 kilograms of TNT, greater explosive power than in the London bombings of July 2005, Joerg Ziercke, head of the Federal Criminal Office, told the same press conference.
The targets for the planned terrorist attacks were ``not yet concrete,'' said Rainer Griesbaum, a federal prosecutor.
Elite GSG9 Unit
The alleged bombers were detained by the elite GSG9 anti- terrorist unit as part of police raids on 41 sites across the country. Those arrested represented the ``core'' of a group that includes further suspects, Ziercke said. The three men, who will be brought before a federal judge today, may have trained in Pakistan, he said.
Germany faces a higher threat from terrorism because of its military involvement in Afghanistan, the government said in June. Germany has deployed more than 3,000 troops in Afghanistan as part of North Atlantic Treaty Organization efforts to combat Taliban insurgents.
Earlier German media reports said the men planned to attack Frankfurt airport, Europe's third busiest after London Heathrow and Paris Charles de Gaulle, and a U.S. military base in Ramstein, about 80 kilometers (50 miles) southwest of Frankfurt.
The Ramstein base serves as headquarters for the U.S. Air Forces in Europe and is also a NATO installation.
``The security status of our bases in Germany remains the same as yesterday, that is unchanged `Bravo','' Lt. Cmdr. Corey Barker, press spokesman for United States European Command in Stuttgart, said in an interview. ``We have no confirmation from the German authorities that Ramstein was actually targeted.''
`Terror Activity'
The U.S. operates a four-tier alert system, from Alpha to Delta, Barker said. Bravo is defined as an ``increased and more predictable threat of terror activity,'' he said.
``There's a growing problem with home-grown terrorism that's also evident elsewhere in Europe,'' German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble told a Berlin news conference.
``The good news is that our preventive mechanisms have become very efficient,'' Karl-Heinz Kamp, security policy coordinator at the Berlin-based Konrad Adenauer Foundation, which has links to Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union, said in an interview. ``This plot was still in its very early stages.''
Danish police arrested eight ``militant Islamists'' alleged to have al-Qaeda links and who were suspected of plotting a ``major'' attack, the country's intelligence service said yesterday.
Ziercke said that while the structure of the German group was similar to that uncovered in Denmark, ``no direct links'' have been established.
To contact the reporters on this story: Claudia Rach in Berlin at crach1@bloomberg.net ; Brian Parkin in Berlin at bparkin@bloomberg.net .
Last Updated: September 5, 2007 07:40 EDT
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