A 20-year-old Syrian national has been charged by German prosecutors with plotting a major radical Islamic terrorist attack which they claim could have killed up to 200 people.
The man, identified as Yamen A., has been brought up on charges of “preparing serious state-damaging violence,” according to a press release from the Public Prosecutor General.
The prosecutor said that the 20-year-old had been preparing explosive devices and was looking to perform a mass casualty terror attack on behalf of the Islamic State terror group.
Yamen A. is said to have become radicalised last summer and had determined in July of 2017 that he would perpetrate a terrorist attack in Hamburg. They say he wanted to blow himself up in a crowded area but were not totally positive on where the suspected terrorist would have carried out the attack.
In order to carry to the attack, prosecutors say he looked up bomb-making advice online and bought the needed chemicals to create a triacetontriperoxide (TATP) bomb. Investigators were able to find all the chemicals needed to create a TATP explosive device in his home.
Prosecutors claim that the investigation into the Syrian was started last October and he was arrested on the 31st of that month.
The case is just the latest foiled terror plot involving an asylum seeker since the height of the migrant crisis. A study from the American Heritage Foundation think tank last year revealed that asylum seekers make up at least half of all the terrorist suspects in Germany.
Many of the plotters have been Syrian nationals, including another mass casualty terrorist plot that was foiled in Dusseldorf in 2016, in which three Syrians plotted to emulate the 2015 Bataclan massacre that took place in Paris.
Last month, another Syrian in Germany on a student visa was arrested for plotting to attack a Berlin synagogue, and it was also revealed that he had tried to train his girlfriend’s seven-year-old son to become a jihadist too.
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