Berlin:
Police have detained two teenage girls and a boy in western Germany on suspicions they were planning an Islamist attack, prosecutors said Friday.
The trio, aged from 15 to 16, are “strongly suspected of planning an Islamist-motivated terror attack and of having committed to carrying it out”, prosecutors said in a statement.
All three are from the Duesseldorf region, and had also “committed to carrying out a crime — murder and manslaughter”, the prosecutors added.
Investigators did not provide further details on the alleged plot, saying the inquiry was still underway.
But the Bild newspaper reported that the youths were allegedly planning to carry out Molotov cocktail and knife attacks in the name of the Islamic State group.
Their targets are believed to be Christians and police, according to the report, which said the suspects were also weighing whether to obtain firearms.
Germany has been on high alert for Islamist attacks since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war in October, with the country’s domestic intelligence chief warning that the risk of such assaults is “real and higher than it has been for a long time”.
Police in January arrested three people over an alleged attack plot targeting the cathedral in Cologne on New Year’s Eve.
Islamist extremists have committed several violent attacks in Germany in recent years, the deadliest being a truck rampage at a Berlin Christmas market in December 2016 that killed 12 people.
More recently, two Afghans linked to IS were arrested in Germany in March on suspicion of planning an attack around Sweden’s parliament in retaliation for Koran burnings.
In October, German prosecutors also charged two Syrian brothers for planning an attack inspired by IS on a church in Sweden.
The number of people on the Islamist extremist spectrum in Germany fell from 28,290 in 2021 to 27,480 in 2022, according to a report from the BfV federal domestic intelligence agency.
But Interior Minister Nancy Faeser has said that Islamist extremism “remains dangerous”.
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