German police arrested a known Islamist on Tuesday following intelligence he was planning to attack a pro-Israel rally to “kill as many people as possible”, reports claim.
A convicted Islamic fundamentalist who was previously jailed for traveling to Syria to fight for the Islamic State was arrested in a police raid Tuesday, as counter-terror police believed he presented an urgent risk to the public. According to German newspaper Bild, police received a tip-off from a foreign secret service that revealed a man identified as Tarik S., who has access to a truck, had researched pro-Israel rallies in his city.
They said the Egyptian-heritage German citizen wanted to “drive a truck into such a demonstration and injure and kill as many people as possible”.
The arrest took place in Duisburg in North Rhine-Westphalia and underlines, Welt reports, the nervousness of the German state security apparatus about the increased risk of terror attacks in the wake of the massive assault on Israel this month.
Tarik S. himself is already well known to authorities, having been arrested in 2016 upon his return from the Islamic State, where he traveled in 2013 to join their jihad. A German court heard how he had featured in Islamic State propaganda videos, posing with a decapitated corpse in one, and was known to his comrades in ISIS as “Osama the German”.
He was sentenced to five years in prison in 2017 and was subsequently released.
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