Until now, Medebach-Oberschledorn was best known for its hiking and biking. A tourist town in a quiet corner of North Rhine-Westphalia, its vacation homes are usually occupied by visitors enjoying its acclaimed mountain scenery. But the picturesque spot achieved less welcome notoriety this week when German authorities arrested three men to avert what German Federal Prosecutor Monika Harms called “serious and massive bombings” on targets that may have included the nearby U.S. Ramstein Air Base and the Frankfurt International Airport.
Michael Probst / AP
The three, identified only as German nationals Fritz Martin G., 28, and Daniel Martin S., 21, and a 28-year-old Turk named as Adem Y. because of a German law barring publication of their full names at this stage of the investigation, were picked up Tuesday in a carefully planned operation by members of Germany’s elite GSG-9 antiterrorist unit. Two of the suspects were reportedly arrested inside one of the holiday apartments. A third was apprehended nearby after escaping through a bathroom window. They were flown by helicopter to a closed hearing at the Federal criminal court in Karlsruhe, which ordered them held pending trial.
The hearings came after what has been described as one of the largest police operations of its kind in Germany. U.S. intelligence agencies also played a key role in helping their German counterparts disrupt the alleged plot. A counterterrorism official familiar with the investigation, who asked for anonymity when discussing sensitive material, told NEWSWEEK that some of the U.S. involvement in the case related to gathering information about possible connections one or more of the suspects had in Pakistan.
German authorities said the three suspects were affiliated with the Islamic Jihad Union (IJU), a militant Islamic network based in Uzbekistan. The group is little known outside the former Soviet republic where it is based, but some of its members or supporters are believed to play an increasingly active role in supporting the activities of the remnants of Al Qaeda’s central command, which is believed to be hiding out in tribal areas along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan.
Investigators on both sides of the Atlantic appear to believe that one or more of the suspects arrested in the German plot traveled to Pakistan for indoctrination and training, and indications are that U.S. agencies helped the Germans track down the Pakistan connection. In Pakistan, the German suspects may have come into contact with IJU operatives affiliated with Al Qaeda. Two of the suspects are said to be converts to Islam.
According to German authorities, the men had stashed away 1,500 pounds of hydrogen peroxide in giant plastic vats and had armed themselves with detonators and electrical components that would have enabled them to produce a device with the blast power of 1,200 pounds of TNT. Hydrogen peroxide is used both in hair bleach and in the kind of homemade explosives that U.S. and British officials feared would be used in a plot to attack transatlantic airliners a year ago. “This would have enabled them to make bombs with more explosive power than the ones used in the London and Madrid bombings,” said Jörg Ziercke of Germany’s Federal Crime Office.
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Police had monitored the suspects for months prior to the arrests after spotting one of them observing a U.S. military facility in Hanau, near Frankfurt. Even though they believed the suspects were buying material that could be used for bombmaking, the sources said, German investigators had trouble gathering enough evidence to bring early criminal charges against them. One key problem: while German law allows telephone tapping, it largely prohibited investigators from using electronic bugs to eavesdrop on the suspects as they met in buildings or vehicles.
At one point early this summer, investigators became convinced that the suspects knew they were being watched by authorities. What was particularly disturbing, said one investigator, was that the suspects appeared to continue their preparations for a possible attack even though they knew they were under surveillance. According to a report on the Web site of the German magazine Der Spiegel, the crackdown finally came after investigators secretly swapped some of the suspects’ stash of concentrated hydrogen peroxide for a much weaker solution of the same chemical. Targets for the attacks apparently were never finalized but were believed to have included U.S. military bases and other places popular with Americans.
German media reports have linked at least one of those arrested to an extremist Islamic group that gathered at a multicultural center in Neu-Ulm, a small city in Bavaria. Authorities alarmed by the growing fundamentalist presence closed the center down in 2005; the same group later transferred its operations to the Islamist Information Center in Ulm (a separate city located in Baden-Württemberg), which police raided Wednesday as they stepped up their hunt for an additional five terror suspects.
The German arrests came shortly after Danish law-enforcement agencies arrested eight people accused of storing “unstable explosives” in a heavily populated area of Copenhagen. At a hearing held Tuesday, two of the men were charged with plotting to commit a terrorist act against Denmark, but there are no indications so far of links between the Danish and German arrests.
The arrests also came shortly before the sixth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington–and underscored recent calls by German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble for Germany to beef up its security. Schäuble has pressed for a proposal to change laws allowing the pre-emptive detention of suspected militants in Germany, which “has increasingly moved into the cross hairs of international terrorism,” he said last weekend. The country’s role in NATO peacekeeping efforts in Afghanistan is thought to be helping fuel the rising Islamist tensions within its borders. But hatred of the West, and America in particular, was seen as the driving force behind the alleged plot around Frankfurt. “We are under threat,” Schäuble said Wednesday in Berlin. “We have to remain vigilant.”
For the residents of Medebach-Oberschledorn, that warning now strikes a chord. “Maybe in a bigger city you suspect these kinds of things,” says Verena Traumann, an employee at the local tourist information bureau. “But not here.”