The trial of a 20-year-old Syrian asylum seeker, accused of plotting to detonate explosives in a crowd in Germany, started at a court in Hamburg this week.
The 20-year-old migrant was brought before the Hamburg Higher Regional Court Thursday to begin the process following his arrest in October of last year, Die Welt reports.
According to the federal prosecutor’s office, the 20-year-old had not only looked up instructions for how to make explosive devices online but had also begun the process of manufacturing the explosives for a potential device.
The prosecutor alleged that the Syrian, who lived in Schwerin in the region of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, had become a sympathiser of the Islamic State terror group and was viewing their material online. Both the Federal Criminal Police Office and the Office of the Protection of the Constitution had been monitoring his activities prior to his arrest.
Investigators said that the Syrian had viewed instructional material online on how to build an explosive device using triacetone triperoxide (TATP), which has been used in several radical Islamic terror attacks in the past.
Earlier this month, sources claimed that the terrorists involved in the 2017 Barcelona attacks attack had stockpiled 450lbs of TATP which they intended to place in a truck and detonate outside the Eiffel Tower in Paris.
Three months prior to his arrest, it is alleged, the 20-year-old Syrian had ordered all the ingredients to make TATP and, according to investigators, tried to create the substance on at least five different occasions.
The trial is expected to continue through until October, with the federal prosecutors expecting to be cooperating with other prosecutors from several different regions of the country in the case.
The plot follows a similar terror plan hatched by Syrian asylum seekers in the city of Dusseldorf which was foiled by authorities in 2016. The three asylum seekers plotted a shooting massacre in the same vein as the Bataclan attacks that took place in Paris in 2015.
A report by the U.S.-based Heritage Foundation think tank last year said that more than half of the suspects in terror plots in Germany since 2014 have been migrants.
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