The arrest of an Islamist in Römerberg, Rhineland-Palatinate, last week gave another insight into the madness of Germany’s migration and naturalisation policy: The Pakistani by birth went to Pakistan with his family 20 years ago to be trained as a terrorist in an Islamist terror camp. From there, he was summarily deported to Germany – where he later joined the “Islamic State”. Because the man benefits from the blessings of German citizenship and is formally a (passport) German, the judiciary and taxpayers have had to deal with the dangerous man for years.
Sixty-year-old Aleem N. is accused of membership in the terrorist group “Islamic State” (IS) and of preparing a serious act of violence endangering the state. As so often in comparable cases, the suspect, described by the media as a “German of Pakistani descent”, was up to his mischief right under the eyes of the authorities: In 2007, he had already been sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment as a terrorist after he had been deported from Pakistan to Germany – because he had made use of the option to take German citizenship straightaway after marrying a German woman.
At his trial, it turned out that he acted as a kind of courier and middleman for the terrorist organisation Al-Qaeda in Germany. In doing so, he was in contact with its leadership and recruited terrorists of German origin. After serving his sentence, N. continued to maintain close and permanent contact with Islamist circles. In the last two years, he is said to have repeatedly attempted to travel to IS in Syria in order to receive military training there. In addition, he is said to have acted as a translator and propagandist on the internet and to have maintained contact with IS leaders. In 2021, the IS even conducted a telephone interview of N. to check his “reliability”.
The accused had first come to the attention of the authorities when he had expressed vehement approval of the terrorist attacks of 9/11 at his workplace in the nuclear research centre (!) Karlsruhe. The case had even occupied the state parliament of Baden-Württemberg because his radical views were already known at that time, but were not on record during the security check at the workplace because the information had not been passed on by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution in Stuttgart.
An extremist, classified by the investigators as a ” high risk “, whose views have been known for more than two decades, who has continued his terrorist activities after his release from prison and who has been deported from his actual home country Pakistan to Germany, continues to endanger this state; N. is not an isolated case.
The fact that this time he was probably arrested just in time before he could join the IS or carry out an attack in Germany was more a matter of luck than the result of prudent state action. If the mishap from the early 2000s had happened again, when the Stuttgart Office for the Protection of the Constitution did not pass on important information about N., Germany might have had to pay a much higher price than the vast sums of taxpayers’ money spent on keeping such extremists – who are the true threats to the state – under surveillance and constantly having to pursue them legally…