German police raid homes of Islamic extremist suspected raising funds for attacks
BERLIN — German police raided the homes of two alleged Islamic extremists suspected of raising funds to support terror attacks and recruiting militants for paramilitary training in Pakistan’s border region, officials said Wednesday.
About 30 officers carried out raids on three apartments and a studio in the cities of Ulm and Bonn, seizing computers and documents, police and prosecutors in the southwestern German state of Baden-Wuerttemberg said.
No arrests were made because there was no imminent threat or risk of the suspects leaving the country to avoid prosecution, Stuttgart prosecution spokeswoman Claudia Krauth said. No formal charges had been filed against them.
They said the suspects — a 29-year-old German of Syrian descent and a 27-year-old German convert to Islam — are known to be active in the local Islamist scene and have been under investigation since June 2010.
“They were recruiting others to undergo training in a terror camp in the border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan,” Krauth said.
Krauth added that the raid had long been planned and that there was no imminent danger of an attack.
“We hope to understand who donated how much money for those activities and to understand where that money went,” she said.
Intelligence officials have said that several Germans have been — or currently are — undergoing paramilitary training in a terror camp in Pakistan’s lawless Waziristan region.
Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, says that about 225 people who are German citizens or have lived in Germany, have undergone paramilitary training in Afghanistan or Pakistan since the 1990s. A group of 10 recruits is known to have left the northern port city Hamburg in 2009.
One of them, Ahmed Siddiqui, was arrested by U.S. forces in Afghanistan last year. He provided interrogators details of an early stage terrorist plot in Europe last year, which led the U.S. and others to issue a travel alert for Europe.
Independently, German police in April arrested three suspected al-Qaida members in the western city of Duesseldorf allegedly working on making a shrapnel-laden bomb to attack a crowded place. Authorities believe the cell’s alleged ringleader trained in a terror camp in Pakistan.
Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
