Three men allegedly trained in Pakistan by an Al Qaeda-linked group have been arrested in a suspected plot to stage massive car bomb attacks on U.S. troops and other Americans near U.S. military bases and German airports, authorities said Wednesday.
After months of surveillance during which German police secretly replaced a stockpile of bomb chemicals with a weaker mixture, a SWAT team raided a vacation home in a wooded village in central Germany on Tuesday and arrested the suspects, two of whom were German converts to Islam. One of the suspects grabbed an officer’s gun, shooting him in the hand.
Searches in five German states deployed 600 officers, an unprecedented number for an anti-terrorism operation led by federal police here, on the same day that Danish police seized bomb materials in Copenhagen and charged a Pakistani and an Afghan with plotting an attack under the direction of unidentified Al Qaeda leaders. Authorities said they knew of no direct connections between the men arrested in the two nations.
The two alleged plots stoke fears that a resurgent Al Qaeda is using hideouts near the Afghan-Pakistani border to train Europe-based militants to hit Western targets in Europe.
The three suspects in Germany allegedly planned simultaneous strikes on three soft targets that might have included nightclubs, bars, restaurants or airports frequented by U.S. soldiers and tourists, according to German and U.S. law-enforcement officials.
Because the confiscated materials could have produced the equivalent of about 1,000 pounds of TNT, the casualty toll could have far exceeded the transport bombings that killed 52 people in London in 2005 and 191 people in Madrid in 2004, officials said.
“The London bombs had only [6 to 10 pounds] of explosive material,” Joerg Ziercke, chief of the federal police, said at a news conference. “Here, we are talking about [approximately 1,000 pounds]. In my opinion, a high number of casualties was the main objective, otherwise this enormous amount of explosives is hard to explain.”
The third suspect arrested Tuesday was a Turkish Muslim living in Germany.
The three allegedly underwent training last year at a terrorist camp in northern Pakistan run by the Islamic Jihad Union, an extremist network that broke away from the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, a longtime Al Qaeda ally, authorities said.
“We have been concerned about the heightened threat from Al Qaeda and affiliated groups such as the IJU, and this particular plot is consistent with that trend of decentralized command and control in many parts of the world,” said a U.S. counterterrorism official who was not authorized to speak on the record.
German police conducted 41 searches Tuesday and were investigating 7 to 10 associates of the jailed suspects, who were said to be testing mixtures and assembling bomb components at the time of the arrest. Surveillance revealed that the jailed suspects’ primary motivation was a hatred of Americans, whether soldiers or tourists, German and U.S. officials said.
“In the suspects’ minds, they were from days to a couple of weeks away from an attack,” said another law-enforcement official who asked to remain anonymous. “The targets weren’t that set, but they wanted to hit soft targets around military bases where there are large populations of Americans. They wanted to have coordinated attacks — the police assessment is three separate attacks, probably with car bombs.”
Like the Danish group, the suspects in Germany allegedly received orders or external communications from a network in Pakistan, officials said.
Police had planned to wrap up surveillance and make arrests probably before the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, but a coincidence sped things up.
While returning Monday from a trip allegedly made to acquire bomb components, the suspects were briefly stopped by traffic police because the high beams on their vehicle were on during the day. Through “undercover methods,” police learned the incident had made the suspects nervous and suspicious, said Ziercke, the federal police chief.
A SWAT team swarmed the suspects’ house Tuesday afternoon, arresting two. The third barricaded himself in a bathroom, jumped from a window and fled over a back-yard fence, police said. When officers converged on him, he managed to wrestle away a gun, wounding an officer in the hand, officials said. The suspect tried to shoot a second officer, but the gun misfired, Ziercke said.
That suspect is likely to face additional charges, officials said.
