Six Syrians arrested for ‘planning terror attack’ in Germany

From the German edition of The Local

German police on Tuesday arrested six Syrian refugees suspected of preparing a terror attack in the name of the Islamic State jihadist group, prosecutors said.

The suspects, aged 20 to 28, were detained in dawn raids that saw some 500 police officers swoop on residences in the cities of Kassel, Essen, Hanover and Leipzig.

The men are accused of belonging to “the foreign terrorist group that calls itself the Islamic State”, Christian Hartwig, a spokesman for the Frankfurt prosecutor’s office, said in a statement.

“The accused are also suspected of preparing an attack on a public target in Germany using weapons or explosives,” Hartwig said.

The investigators believe the men had not yet finalized their attack plan, he added. But the local Hessischer Rundfunk radio station, citing sources close to the probe, said the accused “had planned an attack on the Christmas market in Essen”, a city in western Germany.