On July 6th, German, Dutch, and Belgian authorities launched a series of raids, leading to the arrests of a total of 9 people on suspicion of terrorism.
In the Netherlands, a 29-year-old man from Tajikistan and his 31-year-old wife from Kyrgyzstan were placed under police custody, the Public Prosecutor’s Office reports. The man was arrested in Eindhoven, the woman in a residence in Breda. Both had been residents in the country since 2022.
According to the Dutch intelligence and security agency AIVD, the man is a member of the Islamist terrorist group Islamic State (IS) and was under instructions to plan an attack. While such plans had not yet taken concrete shape, they were nonetheless deemed serious enough by authorities to intervene.
The arrests were made in close cooperation with German authorities since the man had been in contact with suspects living there.
In Germany, seven men were arrested and were presented with the same charges. Over two hundred police officers, some from elite units, were involved in the operations.
Five suspects are from Tajikistan, one from Turkmenistan, and another from Kyrgyzstan. According to information from WELT, ages range between 20 and 45 years old.
The accused had been acquaintances for a long time and shared a “radical Islamic outlook,” prosecutors say.
Shortly after the beginning of the Russo-Ukrainian war in 2022, the group traveled to Germany under the pretense of being refugees fleeing the violence.
The men were arrested at various locations in the North Rhine-Westphalia region. They are charged with having formed a terrorist group there intending to carry out “high-profile attacks” in Germany “in the spirit of IS.”
According to the German prosecution, the suspects already had targets in mind, having scouted suitable locations. They were also in the process of trying to obtain weapons. What targets they exactly envisioned has not been disclosed.
The group was in contact with members of IS-K (Islamic State of Khorasan), an IS offshoot that mainly uses Afghanistan and Pakistan as its base of operations. Since April 2022, it had been collecting money for the organization, which it managed to transfer, according to prosecutors.
Federal Interior Minister Nancy Faeser (SPD) said German authorities had succeeded in striking “a significant blow against Islamist terrorism.”
“Germany continues to be in the crosshairs of Islamist terrorist organizations and of Islamist-motivated individual perpetrators,” she said, adding that the threat remains “acute.”
That same Thursday morning, in the Belgian city of Verviers, police showed up in force to “conduct house searches,” mayor Alexandre Loffet told RTBF.
The mayor could not provide more details since it involved a dossier of the federal prosecutor’s office, said his spokesman Eric Van Duyse. While he clarified that “three searches were carried out, two in Verviers and one in the Liège region,” the federal prosecutor’s office had chosen not to report on any possible arrests.
At the time of writing, all suspects detained in Germany as well as in the Netherlands have been arraigned before a criminal court.
In April of this year, various Western intelligence agencies warned that the West should prepare itself for possible acts of terrorism committed by a re-emerging IS.
In an interview with De Telegraaf, Dutch terrorism expert Beatrice De Graaf then said that IS-K had announced another attack “à la September 11th in the West,” adding that it was “like Groundhog Day,” and that “just like in that movie, we are back to square one.”
