Police in Essen, western Germany, announced the arrest of a man on Tuesday after receiving “indications of a possible attack scenario.”
A young man was arrested in Germany because he was suspected of planning an attack. The latter was “known to the police,” local police officers said in a short press release, without providing any information about his identity.
He was arrested in his apartment in Duisburg, which was searched by police. According to several media outlets, it is a 29-year-old jihadist who was considering attacking a pro-Israel demonstration.
The weekly newspaper Der Spiegel and the popular newspaper Bild claim that the police received information from a foreign intelligence agency that the man had, among other things, searched the Internet for pro-Israel protests and consulted jihadist content, which raised certain fears about planning of an attack.
The warning was deemed serious enough for the man to be arrested under the Risk Prevention Act. Police fear that “the conflict between Israel and Hamas could motivate this man to carry out an attack,” according to local media reports.
The man is German-Egyptian and traveled to Syria via Turkey at the end of 2013, where he joined Daesh, “Der Spiegel” recalls. When he returned to Germany in 2016, he was arrested at Frankfurt Airport and sentenced to five years in prison by a juvenile court in 2017 for belonging to a terrorist organization.