A week after the shots were fired at the old synagogue in Essen, there are further indications of attempted anti-Semitic attacks in the Ruhr area – and speculation that Iranian state authorities may be involved. The Central Office for the Prosecution of Terrorism (ZenTer) at the Düsseldorf Public Prosecutor’s Office confirmed investigations against a 35-year-old German-Iranian on Friday: The man is in custody because he is said to have tried to incite a compatriot to an arson attack on the synagogue in Dortmund. There are also indications that the arrested person could have thrown a Molotov cocktail at a school in Bochum that borders directly on the local synagogue.
North Rhine-Westphalia’s Interior Minister Herbert Reul (CDU) also said on Friday in the NRW state parliament that the Dortmund police had “pulled a suspected perpetrator out of circulation.” He could not yet say “whether there is a group behind it,” added Reul: “No one knows at the moment.”
However, according to SZ information, Reul also informed the members of the interior committee, behind closed doors, that the German security authorities were not currently ruling out “governmental interference” from abroad. When trying to recruit an accomplice for the planned attack in Dortmund, the arrested man is said to have said, among other things, that he could organize an escape and “facilitated entry to Iran.” In Düsseldorf, this raises fears that the man could have connections to the Iranian secret service. The public prosecutor’s office in Düsseldorf refused to comment.
related to other actions?
The plans for the arson attack on the Dortmund synagogue were blown because the alleged instigator addressed the wrong person: the person addressed refused – and revealed himself to the police. Based on the testimony, the police searched the accused’s apartment on the night of December 18 and arrested him. On November 19, the District Court of Dortmund issued an arrest warrant. If convicted, the accused could face up to eleven years in prison for attempted incitement to serious arson.
It is currently unclear whether the arrested man from Dortmund has anything to do with last week’s anti-Semitic act in downtown Essen. There, late in the evening of November 17, an unknown person fired four shots at the door of the rabbi’s apartment next to the Old Synagogue. A spokesman for the Attorney General’s Office said on Friday only that this case would continue to be examined in a separate investigation. Nobody was injured in Essen. The recordings of a video camera from that night have so far revealed “no sufficient suspicions” to investigate a specific person.
Interior Minister Reul said on Friday that the current findings put the crime in Essen “in a new light”. There may be “a connection” between different crimes that night from November 17th to 18th.
The public prosecutors in Düsseldorf now have “sufficient factual evidence” that the 35-year-old suspect was in the neighboring city of Bochum on November 17 – the evening of the Essen attack. The investigators are investigating the initial suspicion that the man could have thrown an incendiary device at the Hildegardis school. This resulted in damage to a window frame and the styrofoam insulation of the high school in downtown Bochum. The Hildegardis school is right next to the rear part of the Bochum synagogue.