The arrest warrants concern three young people, two girls aged 15 and 16 and a 15-year-old boy from North Rhine-Westphalia, in the northwest of the country, suspected of having “planned a terrorist attack in “Islamist motivation and having admitted to being ready to commit it”, according to a press release from the public prosecutor’s office in Düsseldorf, in the west of Germany.
“They thought about getting guns.”
They are suspected of having prepared a terrorist attack for Islamist motives. “Due to the age of the suspects and the ongoing investigation,” the prosecution did not give further details about what they were planning. The German daily Bild claims that the teenagers planned to attack police officers and churches in the name of the Islamic State (IS) with knives and molotov cocktails.
“They considered obtaining firearms,” the newspaper added. German authorities are on guard regarding the Islamist threat, particularly since the start of the conflict on October 7, 2023 between Israel and the Islamic movement Hamas.
Danger from “acute” terrorism in Germany
In an interview with the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung, given just after the Moscow attack at the end of March, Interior Minister Nancy Faeser stressed that “the danger emanating from Islamist terrorism remained acute” in Germany. The authorities are all the more on alert as Germany prepares to host the Euro football tournament (June 14-July 14).
In this interview, Nancy Faeser stated that “currently, the biggest Islamist threat in Germany emanates from the Islamic State – Khorasan Province” (EIK). In recent months, two raids have taken place in the country targeting suspected members of this branch before they took action. Two suspected Afghan jihadists suspected of having prepared an attack near the Swedish parliament were arrested in Thuringia (in eastern Germany) on March 19 .
And at the end of December 2023, three suspected Islamists were arrested, suspected of having planned an attack on New Year’s Eve against Cologne Cathedral (west) using “a car”. So far, the deadliest jihadist attack committed on German soil dates back to December 2016: a ram truck attack claimed by the Islamic State group left 12 dead at a Christmas market in the center of Berlin.