The police received “indications of a possible attack scenario”. A man suspected of plotting an attack was arrested in western Germany on Tuesday, Essen police said. These suspicions are “the subject of an investigation,” according to the police, who stated that the man was “known” to their services.
This Wednesday, the regional anti-terrorism office took over the investigation. The man, whose identity authorities are not revealing, is suspected of “conspiracy to commit a crime or murder,” the West German public prosecutor’s office said in a press release. There are indications that “the suspect may have had contact with a person residing abroad for criminally reprehensible reasons,” he said without providing any further details. The public prosecutor’s office is considering its possible submission to a judge.
This man was arrested this Tuesday in his apartment in Duisburg, which was searched by the police, the police said. According to several media outlets, it is a 29-year-old jihadist, Tarik S., who was reportedly considering an attack on a professional-Israeli demonstration.
The weekly newspaper “Der Spiegel” and the popular newspaper “Bild” claim that the police received information from a foreign secret service that the man had researched pro-Israel demonstrations, particularly on the Internet, and consulted jihadist content, which fueled fears that he wanted to plan an attack. The warning was considered serious enough and Tarik S. was arrested under the Risk Prevention Act.
The suspect had joined Daesh in Syria
The police fear that the current war between Israel and Hamas could motivate the man, who is known as an Islamist, to carry out an attack, according to information from the magazine.
Tarik S., a German-Egyptian, 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.