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WORLD / Europe
Germans arrest 3 in alleged terror plot
(AP)
Updated: 2007-09-06 06:35
BERLIN - Three militants from an Islamic group linked to al-Qaida were
planning "imminent" bomb attacks against Americans in Germany when an
elite anti-terrorist unit raided their small-town hideout after months of
intense surveillance, officials said Wednesday.
Armed German special police officers escort a handcuffed suspect (L) from
the German Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe September 5, 2007.
[Reuters]?
The men - two German converts to Islam and a Turkish citizen who
prosecutors said shared a "profound hatred of US citizens" - allegedly
obtained military-style detonators and enough chemicals to make bombs
more powerful than those that killed 191 commuters in Madrid in 2004 and
52 in London in 2005.
Frankfurt International Airport and the nearby US Ramstein Air Base
reportedly were the suspects' primary targets.
Prosecutors indicated police defused the danger earlier in the six-month
investigation by stealthily substituting a harmless chemical for the raw
bomb material amassed by the suspects. They said police moved in Tuesday
when the alleged plotters seemed ready to try to make bombs.
Coming less than a week before the sixth anniversary of the Sept. 11
attacks on the US, it was the second consecutive day that European
authorities announced they had thwarted a major attack. Danish officials
said Tuesday they had broken up a bomb plot by arresting six Danish
citizens and two other residents with links to senior al-Qaida terrorists.
Security experts said the two purported plots are a reminder that Muslim
extremists are not driven just by anger at the United States and its
policies.
Islamic radicals "treat the whole Western world as their enemy," said
Tadeusz Wrobel, an analyst of military and security issues in Warsaw.
Bob Ayres, a former US intelligence officer who is an analyst at Chatham
House, a London think tank, said the radical ideology embraced by Islamic
militants outweighs national loyalty, noting that many of those arrested
in alleged European terror plots in recent years grew up here.
"They're not Germans, Brits or French. They are radical Muslims living in
these countries," he said.
Prosecutors said the three men arrested in Germany underwent training at
camps in Pakistan run by the Islamic Jihad Union and had formed a German
cell of the al-Qaida-influenced group. Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden is
believed hiding in Pakistan.
Officials described the Islamic Jihad Union as a Sunni Muslim group based
in Central Asia that is an offshoot of the Islamic Movement of
Uzbekistan, an extremist organization with origins in that former Soviet
state.
"This group distinguishes itself through its profound hatred of US
citizens," Joerg Ziercke, head of the Federal Crime Office, Germany's
equivalent of the FBI, told reporters.
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