German police arrest 3 Iraqi refugees suspected of planning terror attack

From Deutsche Welle and the Telegraph

Three Iraqi refugees were arrested on Wednesday in northern Germany for preparing a terror attack.  Federal prosecutors said Shahin F. and Hersh F., both 23, and Rauf S., 36, were taken into custody in an early morning raid by a police SWAT team in the area of Dithmarschen, near the border with Denmark.

“According to the findings to date, the suspects had not yet selected a specific target for their attack,” the federal prosecutor’s office said in a statement. One of the suspects had allegedly spoken of wanting to target the largest possible group of ‘non-believers, but not children’, Spiegel Online said. 

Investigators allege the two 23-year-olds, Shahin F. and Hersh F., downloaded bomb-making instructions from the internet and tried to purchase a detonation device from the United Kingdom. British authorities were able to halt the shipment of the detonation device to Germany.

The suspects, who had refugee status in Germany, had been under surveillance for some time by a task force of around 200 investigators, said Holger Muench, the head of Germany’s federal police. “The case shows that the threat of Islamic terrorism is still present,” Muench told reporters.

It wasn’t immediately clear when the suspects came to Germany.