The suspect is taken into custody by officers from the special task force (SEK) wearing a protective mask.
(Photo: dpa)
Castrop-Rauxel After the anti-terrorist operation in Castrop-Rauxel, the Düsseldorf public prosecutor’s office applied for arrest warrants against two Iranians aged 32 and 25. This was announced by the authority on Sunday. The brothers are accused, among other things, of procuring the toxins cyanide and ricin for an Islamist-motivated attack and thus wanting to kill “an unspecified number of people”.
According to a spokesman for the Düsseldorf public prosecutor’s office, the suspicion was initially directed against the 32-year-old. Anti-terror investigators searched his apartment in the Ruhr area city on Sunday night. The 25-year-old was also there. Both were arrested.
It was initially unclear how concretely the possible attack plans had progressed and what a possible target would have been. No toxins were found during the night search, investigators said. Nothing has been found so far, but the investigation is ongoing, said a spokesman for the Attorney General’s Office in the evening.
The investigators see the brothers as suspected of preparing a serious act of violence that is dangerous to the state and of conspiring to commit a crime, namely murder. A magistrate at the Dortmund District Court is now deciding whether the two should be remanded in custody.
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As the dpa learned from security circles, it is suspected that the 32-year-old is a supporter of a Sunni Islamist terrorist group. The brother was known to the police beforehand, but for reasons unrelated to Islamist terrorism.
Note from the US
Special forces searched the 32-year-old’s apartment on Sunday night and arrested him. The German investigators had become active because of a tip from colleagues in the USA: There had been a tip from a US security agency, said the spokesman for the Düsseldorf public prosecutor’s office.
They got the information about the 32-year-old on Saturday and came to the conclusion that a search warrant had to be obtained and executed immediately. NRW Interior Minister Herbert Reul (CDU) said: “We had serious information that prompted the police to take action during the night.”
The investigators struck around midnight. The scene was cordoned off over a wide area. Police, fire brigade and rescue workers were on site with a large contingent. Many emergency services wore protective suits. Evidence was brought in blue barrels to a decontamination point set up by the fire department, a dpa reporter reported.
According to a report by “Bild”, employees from the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) were also on site as consultants because of the biological and chemical dangers for the emergency services. Several employees of the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) and a defuse squad were also deployed. The investigators secured evidence such as electronic storage media. These would now have to be evaluated, said the spokesman for the Attorney General’s Office.
No toxins were found during SEK operations in Castrop-Rauxel
The men are said to have both been in Germany since 2015. When they were arrested, they were only scantily clad and led across the street into an emergency vehicle, eyewitnesses reported. Neither of them resisted.
According to the RKI, the highly toxic ricin is listed under “biological weapons” in the war weapons list. Cyanide is also highly toxic, even the smallest amounts are fatal to humans.
Four years ago, investigations in Cologne showed how dangerous ricin is: In a 15-storey building in the high-rise district of Chorweiler, a Tunisian and his German wife produced the chemical and set off test explosions. A foreign secret service became suspicious and gave a tip. Both were sentenced to long prison terms. An expert report showed that, purely arithmetically, 13,500 people could have died from the amount of poison. With the planned spread by a cluster bomb spiked with steel balls, it would have killed around 200 people.
Federal Interior Minister Nancy Faeser (SPD) does not see the danger of Islamist attacks in this country averted against the background of the operation. According to a statement from her ministry, Germany is still in the immediate target range of Islamist terrorist organizations. Islamist-motivated individual perpetrators are another significant danger. “Our security authorities therefore expect preparations for an attack at any time.” Since the year 2000, the authorities in Germany have prevented 21 Islamist attacks.
The terrorism expert Peter Neumann said on the sidelines of the CSU state group retreat: “This threat is less than six or seven years ago, but it still exists. You mustn’t forget that.” He pointed out that in almost every terror plan that has been uncovered in recent years, the key clue has come from US secret services. Germany is still very dependent on America’s secret services when it comes to fighting terrorism internally.
The Greens interior expert Konstantin von Notz told the newspapers of the Funke media group: “Once again it becomes clear that with all current, very serious threats from the area of militant, well-networked right-wing extremism, we are by no means aware of the dangers emanating from Islamist perpetrators from the lose sight and be allowed to underestimate.”
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