A 17-year-old ‘Syrian’ asylum seeker has been arrested in Brandenburg, Germany after authorities found evidence he was planning a suicide bombing in the capital of Berlin.
Brandenburg Minister of the Interior Karl-Heinz Schröter said the 17-year-old, presumed Syrian, who came to Germany as an asylum seeker in 2015, was plotting to blow himself up in the capital and had told his mother about the attack through the social media messaging service Whats App Kronen Zeitung reports.
The teen lived in the northern Brandenburg district of Uckermark in an asylum home for underage migrants since 2016 and was taken into custody there by special forces police Monday.
Schröter acknowledged that the young man had messaged his family telling them about the attack after police tweeted that they had received a tip.
Police have since called into question whether or not the suspect in the case is in fact from Syria, though the Interior Ministry claimed he is of Syrian origin.
Germany has seen a large increase in migrants, particularly those underage, who enter the country without any documentation at all or come with falsified documents that would help their chances of claiming asylum.
Police say the terror suspect is currently being questioned and have been tight-lipped on any further details of the investigation.
Over the past year, Germany has suffered several attacks carried out by radical Islamic extremists, many of them conducted by asylum seekers. The most well known and most brutal case being the Christmas market terror attack in Berlin with saw failed Tunisian asylum seeker Anis Amri steal a lorry and use it to run down and kill 12 and injure 56 others.
Several of the attacks were also carried out by underage Muslims as well. In Hamburg 15-year-old Safia S. attempted to stab a policeman to death and was given six years in prison.
There has been a rise in the number of underage Muslim’s getting involved with radical Islamists and plotting terror attacks in the country as well. Shortly before the Christmas Market terror attack, a 12-year-old German-Iraqi boy attempted to set off a nail bomb the Christmas market in the town of Ludwigshafen.
In neighbouring Austria, another 12-year-old was arrested for being a member of an Islamic state inspired terrorist cell. The young boy was associated with another Austrian Muslim, also underage, who had plotted to carry out a terror attack in Vienna before he was arrested by police.