How much more will it take?
German police said on Monday they had captured a man suspected of planning a bomb attack who had slipped through their grasp during a raid two days ago. “Tired but overjoyed: we captured the terror suspect last night in Leipzig,” Saxony state police said on twitter.
Police had been looking for the suspect, 22-year-old Syrian refugee Jaber Albakr, since he evaded them during a raid on an apartment in the eastern city of Chemnitz on Saturday.
Albakr had been in Germany since last year and was officially recognised as a refugee, police said at the weekend.
His target was apparently the airport.
The head of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency (BfV) said a Syrian suspect arrested on Monday was building a bomb and probably planned to attack one of the airports in Berlin.
“The danger is mainly characterised by the fact that he developed a very high explosive for which special expertise was needed, and he made it in a very large quantity,” he told ARD’s television news programme, Tagesthemen.
Investigators said earlier they found “some 1.5 kg (3 lb) of an extremely dangerous explosive” in the suspect’s apartment.
State police said the chemical was probably triacetone triperoxide (TATP), a highly unstable substance also used by suicide bombers during the Paris attack in November 2015.
German authorities said earlier on Monday that the suspect was probably inspired by IS and was readying an attack similar to those in Paris and Brussels.
Jaber Albakr, 22, arrived in Germany in February last year during a migrant influx into the country and was granted temporary asylum four months later. Officials said he had not previously aroused suspicion.
Merkel's plague of Syrian refugees is proving to be a terror problem.
More than 200 police commandos took part in the pre-dawn raids in northern Germany to detain the men, who were suspected of either plotting an attack or awaiting orders to commit one.
The men were identified only as Mahir al-H., 17, Ibrahim M., 18, and Mohamed A., 26, in a statement issued by federal prosecutors.
They left Syria last October and travelled via Turkey and Greece - a route used by tens of thousands of refugees and migrants - and arrived in Germany in mid-November.
Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said the three apparently used the same migrant trafficking network as several of the Isis gunmen who killed 130 people in Paris in November last year.
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