Arrested Islamists 'may be linked to Paris attackers'
Published: 05 Feb 2016 11:15 GMT+01:00
Updated: 05 Feb 2016 12:47 GMT+01:00
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German police are looking into a potential link between a man arrested on Thursday on suspicion of planning a terror attack and the men who killed 130 people in Paris in November, reports Spiegel.
A special police enquiry is looking into photographic evidence which shows the 35-year-old Algerian who was arrested in North Rhine-Westphalia eating with someone connected to the Paris attacks, insiders told the weekly magazine.
The suspect arrived in Germany in late December pretending to be a Syrian national.
Investigators now claim to have evidence showing the man holding a weapon somewhere in the Middle East. In one photo he was standing beside a corpse.
In another photo taken by police during their seizures of the man’s property, he can be seen eating with a person connected to the Paris terror attacks, Spiegel’s source said.
No evidence of imminent Berlin attack: chief spy
Germany’s internal intelligence boss says there is no evidence that a terrorist attack in Germany was imminent, after police arrested two men suspected of planning an attack in Berlin.
Hans-Georg Maaßen, head of the Verfassungsschutz, told public broadcaster ZDF that there was concrete evidence “that there are people in Germany who are making plans to carry out attacks.”
But responding to a question as to whether there was evidence of a plan to attack Cologne Karneval or Berlin, he replied that “there is no concrete evidence of an imminent terrorist attack.”
Maaßen defended the police from accusation leveled by the Green Party that Thursday’s raid was unnecessarily spreading panic.
The security services’ goal was to stop potential terror attacks “as soon as possible so that they don’t develop to the stage of being attempted," he said.
Berlin prosecutors were on Thursday extremely careful in their wording of the accusation against the two arrested Algerians, saying that there were “possible plans” to carry out a terror attack in Germany.
Maaßen confirmed to ZDF that the so-called head of the group, a 35-year-old who was living in a refugee home in North-Rhine Westphalia, was not actually arrested on charges of plotting an attack in Germany, but due to a previously existing international arrest warrant issued by the Algerian government.
The Algerian arrest warrants related to an alleged link to terror group Isis.
http://www.thelocal.de/20160205/no-evidence-of-imminent-attack-on-berlin-chief-spy
