Police in Essen, in western Germany, announced on Tuesday the arrest of a man after receiving “indications of a possible attack scenario”.
Suspected of planning an attack, a young man was arrested in Germany. The latter is “known to the police”, local law enforcement officials said in a brief press release, without providing any indication of his identity.
He was arrested at his home in Duisburg, which was searched by the police. According to several media, he is a 29-year-old jihadist, who would have considered an attack against a pro-Israeli demonstration.
The weekly “Der Spiegel” and the popular newspaper “Bild” claim that police received information from a foreign intelligence service that the man had, among other things, searched the Internet for pro-Israeli protests and consulted jihadist content, fueling certain fears about the planning of an attack.
The alert was considered serious enough for the man to be arrested, under the Risk Prevention Act. The police fear that “the conflict between Israel and Hamas could motivate this man to commit an attack,” according to local media reports.
The man is German-Egyptian and went to Syria at the end of 2013, via Turkey, where he joined Daesh, recalls “Der Spiegel”. When he returned to Germany in 2016, he was arrested at Frankfurt airport, then sentenced in 2017 to five years of detention for belonging to a terrorist group by a juvenile court.