Seven young men, including several minors, are alleged to have plotted a terrorist-motivated attack and practised for it in the forest. The authorities have had the group in their sights for a long time. On Thursday morning, special police units were deployed in North Rhine-Westphalia to search flats. This may have prevented an attack.
In the district of Düren between Aachen and Cologne, 350 police forces under the direction of the State Protection Service searched the flats of the suspects. “The suspects are accused of preparing for a terrorist-motivated attack by using propaganda material of the foreign terrorist organisation “Islamic State”,” the Düsseldorf General Public Prosecutor’s Office and the police in Cologne reported in a joint statement.
“The background is the suspicion of the preparation of a serious crime endangering the state,” North Rhine-Westphalia Interior Minister Herbert Reul (69, CDU) explained in a statement before informing the Interior Committee in the state parliament. “There was a suspicion that Islamist dangerous persons in Germany could be preparing an attack. At the centre of the investigation is a group of seven from the Düren area who have joined together to form an Islamist-terrorist network.”
The seven men are between 16 and 22 years old and, according to Reul, have contacts with members of the radical Islamist scene throughout the state and the country. Six of the accused have German passports, two of them also have Russian citizenship, and one has a Turkish passport.
Six of the men are even classified as “Islamist dangerous persons”, one is considered a so-called “relevant person of the Islamist spectrum”.
Reul went on to say that there had been sporadic meetings in other European countries. The group had “probably held some kind of Islamist training session in the forest” and trained there with cutting and stabbing weapons. According to the Minister of the Interior, no firearms were involved.
There had been indications that the men had been ” plotting attacks”. “However, according to our experience so far, there were no concrete plans for attacks,” said Reul. Last but not least, there were no arrests or arrest warrants.
Senior Public Prosecutor Mathias Proyer, spokesman for the Düsseldorf Public Prosecutor’s Office, also confirmed to tabloid BILD: “According to current investigative findings, there were no concrete plans for an attack. However, the evaluation of the evidence is still ongoing.”
All seven suspects, who were apparently caught completely off guard by the police operation in the morning, were reportedly caught in their homes and arrested for identification purposes.
The mission was mainly about finding and subsequently securing further evidence, said the Minister of the Interior. A machete, pepper spray, axes, knives, a telescopic baton and digital devices were found, which now have to be analysed.
Reul expressed his satisfaction with the operation. The case shows once again “that you need a lot of staying power” in such terrorism cases. “Our North Rhine-Westphalian security authorities have had it, because we have been investigating this case intensively for almost a year.
We are very vigilant, Reul said: “We intervene before it is too late. We will not allow terror to be carried out on German soil.”
The investigation, which is still far from being completed, is being led and coordinated by the Central Office for the Prosecution of Terrorism in North Rhine-Westphalia.