The federal prosecutor’s office has uncovered a suspected Islamist terrorist cell in North Rhine-Westphalia and arrested seven suspects. The men are accused of having founded a terrorist organization in Germany and having been active in it, as the supreme German prosecutor announced on Thursday. They are said to have supported the terrorist organization “Islamic State” (IS).
These are five Tajiks, one man with Kyrgyz nationality and one Turkmen. They were arrested at various locations in North Rhine-Westphalia. The investigations were carried out in cooperation with the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and authorities in the Netherlands. Two other people were arrested there.
The seven men are radical Islamists and have known each other for a long time, according to the federal prosecutor. Shortly after the start of the war in Ukraine, they came to Germany from there and formed a terrorist group a year ago. Their goal was to carry out “high-profile attacks in the spirit of IS” here. The investigators found that they had already scouted out possible crime scenes and tried to get weapons. “However, at the time of today’s arrest, there was no concrete attack plan.”
Almost all of the men also collected money for IS. According to the federal prosecutor’s office, they were in contact with members of the regional IS branch “Islamic State Province of Khorasan” (ISPK) who were abroad. In the course of Thursday, an investigating judge at the Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe is to decide on the arrest warrants.