Earlier this year in January, two brothers were arrested by German police following a raid on their home in the town of Castrop-Rauxel near the city of Dortmund, as police asserted that the two Iranian nationals were radical Islamic extremists plotting a mass casualty terrorist attack.
Now, five months following their arrest, the Düsseldorf Public Prosecutor’s Office has indicted 26-year-old Jalal J., the younger of the two brothers, for plotting a terrorist attack and trying to create a biological weapon, a report from the German tabloid Bild reveals.
The Prosecutor General’s Office states that Jalal J. wished to kill as many people as possible with a bomb using either the highly toxic chemical ricin, which is extracted from castor beans, or a compound containing hydrogen cyanide.
The 26-year-old is also accused of having direct contact with other radical Islamic extremists through different messaging services, such as the encrypted messaging service Wickr. Prosecutors claim that the extremists gave him instructions on how to produce the biological weapons. He had been plotting to carry out the attack since at least October of last year, reports claim.
He is also being charged with financing terrorism and is believed to have allied himself with the Islamic State terrorist group.
The Iranian national faces a lengthy prison sentence of six to ten years if found guilty, although his lawyer Marco Ostmeyer has questioned the veracity of the case against his client saying, “the chain of evidence is extremely thin. The allegations are based primarily on information from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).”
During the initial raid on the brothers, police wore protective suits as they feared he may have already created the ricin or cyanide required for the terror attack but found no toxic substances during the raid, Düsseldorf prosecutor Holger Heming said at the time.
While the 32-year-old brother of Jalal J. was also arrested in January, charges against him have since been dropped by prosecutors, who cited a lack of evidence. The 32-year-old has also stated that he had not been privy to any information regarding the alleged plot.
The case is not the first time radical Islamic extremists have been accused of wanting to use the highly toxic substance ricin in order to cause mass killings in Germany, with a judge claiming they had enough castor beans to produce ricin capable of killing as many as 13,500 people.
In 2018, a Tunisian couple was arrested after having ordered 3,300 castor beans to be used to create ricin. The two were also charged with being members of the Islamic State terror group as well as making homemade explosives containing metal balls.
As with the case of the two Iranian brothers, German authorities were tipped off by American security services who noticed the large purchase of castor seeds. Sief Allah H. was first charged in 2019 and then found guilty of trying to create a biological weapon and preparing an act of violent subversion, being sentenced to ten years in prison by the Düsseldorf regional court in March 2020.
Sief Allah H. had previously attempted to join members of the Islamic State in Syria but had failed in his attempt. His Islamic State contacts later helped him assemble the bomb he was planning to detonate, prosecutors said.
Radical Islamic terrorism remains the number one threat to European domestic security according to a recent report from the European police service Europol.
The annual report on terrorism stated that 266 Islamists were arrested on terror offences last year, making up 70% of the total number of terror-related arrests across the 27 member states of the European Union.
