German authorities said Friday they had arrested a 27-year-old Syrian man planning an Islamist machete attack on army soldiers. The suspect had planned to attack Bundeswehr soldiers in Hof, northern Bavaria, during their lunch break, “aiming to kill as many of them as possible,” prosecutors in Munich said.
The Syrian, an “alleged follower of a radical Islamic ideology”, was arrested on Thursday on charges of planning “a serious act of violence endangering the state”.
The man had acquired two heavy knives “around 40 centimetres in length” in recent days, prosecutors said.”The accused wanted to attract attention and create a feeling of insecurity among the population,” they said.
German security services have been on raised alert over the threat of Islamist attacks since the October 7th Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel.
Earlier this month, police shot dead a man in Munich after he opened fire on officers in a suspected “terrorist attack” on the Israeli consulate in Munich. The shootout fell on the anniversary of the kidnap and killing of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games by Palestinian militants. The 18-year-old suspect had previously been investigated by authorities in his home country Austria on suspicion of links to terrorism but the case had been dropped.
That incident followed a spate of knife crime, largely committed by Afghan and Syrian perpetrators, including the Islamist killing of three people at a ‘diversity festival’ in the western city of Solingen in August. The suspect in the attack, which was claimed by the Islamic State group, was a Syrian man who had been slated for deportation from Germany.
In May, an Afghan Islamist—who had lived illegally in Germany for nine years before being given residency—killed a police officer and injured six people in Mannheim.
The German government has responded to the attacks by tightening knife laws and, despite disagreement inside the ‘traffic light coalition,’ taking some steps to curb illegal immigration, including instituting border controls at all land borders and speeding up deportations.
As of December last year, there were nearly 250,000 people in Germany slated for deportation, while only around 16,000 had been actually deported during the entire year, signaling how the country’s lax migration and deportation policies have completely failed.
A federal interior ministry spokesman said if an Islamist motive was confirmed in the latest foiled attack, it would be “further evidence of the high threat posed by Islamist terrorism in Germany.”
The federal domestic intelligence agency has identified 27,200 people considered Islamist extremists.
