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'Massive' terror attack foiled
05/09/2007 14:14 - (SA)
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| Police officers keep watch at Frankfurt airport after German authorities arrested three suspected Islamic terrorists for allegedly plotting attacks. (Bernd Kammerer, AP) |
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Karlsruhe - Germany said on Wednesday it had foiled a "massive" terrorist attack with the arrest of three Islamic extremists who were targeting airports, bars and discotheques used by Americans.
"They were planning massive attacks," Federal Prosecutor Monika Harms said.
"As possible targets ... the suspects named discotheques and pubs and airports frequented by Americans with a view to detonating explosives loaded in cars and killing or injuring many people," Harms told a press conference.
The men, two Germans and a Turk, had amassed more than 700kg of hydrogen peroxide, the same chemical used by suicide bombers in the 2005 attacks on London's transport system which killed 56 people, Harms said.
The chemicals had been stockpiled in a town in the Black Forest and drums of it had been moved to a rented holiday home recently.
Harms said the men, who were arrested on Tuesday, belonged to an organisation with ties to al-Qaeda called Islamic Jihad Union, which German authorities have suspected for several months of planning attacks.
The men were aged 22, 28 and 29.
One of the three had been arrested for spying on a US military base in December but was released soon afterwards, federal police chief Joerg Ziercke said.
All three of the men had attended a training camp in Pakistan in 2006.
Frankfurt airport, US military base
There was no confirmation of media reports that the men had been targeting Frankfurt international airport and the giant US military base in Ramstein.
Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said the men were "very dangerous terrorists".
"They obviously planned these attacks on the orders of an international network," Schaeuble said.
A leading member of Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democratic Union, Wolfgang Bosbach, said the men had probably been planning attacks to coincide with the sixth anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.
"We have succeeded in preventing these attacks at a highly sensitive time," Bosbach told N24 television.
The mayor of Medebach-Oberschledorn, the town where the suspects were arrested, said one of them had been shot by police, although this was not confirmed by prosecutors.
"I was told that one of the suspects was shot but I do not know how badly he was injured," said Mayor Heinrich Nolte.
- AFP
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