German police in the state of Lower Saxony have announced the arrest of a radical Islamist who they say was plotting terror attacks against authorities.
The prosecutor’s office in Celle and the police in Göttingen announced the arrest of the German born 26-year-old radical Islamist Thursday afternoon and said that they had evidence he was plotting to attack police or soldiers Frankfurter Rundschau reports. The man, who is said to have been born in Germany, is part of the Salafist community who preach a radical form of Islam that is also practised by adherents of groups like the Islamic State.
Police raided the man’s apartment and say that they found chemical agents which they said were part of an “unconventional blasting device.” They said that the radical Islamist used acetone peroxide and various electronic components to build a remote fuse for his bomb. It is unclear if he meant to remotely detonate his device or if he would be a suicide bomber.
The material acetone peroxide has been used in multiple terrorist attacks in Europe, most notably during the 2015 Paris attack and the 2016 Brussels attack. The substance is said to be extremely difficult for authorities to detect and is nicknamed “Satan’s Mother” by members of the Islamic State terror group who use the substance in many of their explosive devices in Europe and in the Middle East.
Investigators said they had already begun preliminary interrogations with the suspect who admitted to them that he wanted to target soldiers and police. He said he wanted to try and “lure them into a trap” and detonate his explosive device police say.
The terror-related arrest is just the latest carried out by German authorities who have made a series of investigations and arrests following the Berlin terror attack in December which killed 12 and injured almost 50 others.
Some of the suspects arrested over the course of the last year have been asylum seekers from Syria and other countries, while others have been German-born Muslims who have been radicalised by Salafist hate-preachers.
Earlier this week a Russian man was arrested for having links to the Islamic State and raising money for them in Berlin. Since the beginning of the year, there have been multiple arrests including a 36-year-old Tunisian migrant in Frankfurt, two German-Moroccan brothers accused of having Islamic State links, and a 21-year-old said to have been building a bomb with the help of another terror suspect who planned an attack in the Austrian capital of Vienna.
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