A 36-year-old
Tunisian asylum-seeker arrested on Wednesday on suspicion of planning an
Islamist attack in Germany is also wanted in his homeland over a deadly 2015
assault on a Tunis museum favored by Western tourists, German officials said.
The Tunisian
is suspected of recruiting for Islamic State in Germany since August 2015 and
building up a network of supporters with the aim of carrying out a terrorist
attack, the Frankfurt prosecutor's office said in a statement.
He had lived
in Germany for a decade until 2013, before re-entering the country to seek
asylum in August 2015, it said, five months after Islamist militants stormed
the Bardo Museum and killed 21 foreign tourists.
"The main
suspect is a...Tunisian citizen strongly suspected of working as a recruiter
for the foreign terrorist organization that calls itself 'Islamic State'...with
the aim of carrying out a terrorist attack in Germany," the statement
said.
The German
newspaper Die Welt identified the Tunisian as Haikel S. and said he had been
known to German security agencies as an adherent of the ultra-conservative
Salafist branch of Sunni Islam for the past decade.
Die Welt quoted
investigators as saying he had been in contact with an Islamic State cell
responsible for "external operations" and had planned attacks in
Europe. Reuters could not immediately independently verify the report.
Germany is on
edge over Islamist violence after a spate of attacks last year, and how a
Tunisian who had been on spy agencies' radar could re-enter the country
undetected may heighten public doubts about Chancellor Angela Merkel's
open-door immigration policy ahead of September's federal elections.
Merkel,
seeking a fourth term in office, has come under heavy fire from right-wing
opponents for allowing more than a million asylum-seekers into the country over
the past two years.
Interior
Minister Thomas de Maiziere declined to say when authorities became aware that
the Tunisian suspect was back in Germany. He also called for increased
surveillance of Salafist mosques in Germany involved in radicalising Muslims.
"States
must put mosques known to be involved in radicalisation under observation and
close them if necessary," he told the Nordwest-Zeitung newspaper.
The Tunisian
was arrested in a security sweep in which more than 1,100 German police raided
56 homes, businesses and mosques in Frankfurt and other towns in the western
state of Hesse.
Peter Beuth,
interior minister of Hesse, said there had been no immediate danger and the
arrests were pre-emptive. The raids followed four months of investigations and
destroyed "an extensive Salafist network", he said.
CONNECTION TO
TUNISIA ATTACKS
The museum
attack was the first major militant strike in Tunisia since the country's
pro-democracy uprising in 2011. In June 2015, an Islamist gunmen shot dead 39
people, mostly British holidaymakers, in the Tunisian seaside town of Sousse.
Tunisian
investigators suspect the Tunisian asylum seeker was involved in "planning
and carrying out" the Bardo Museum assault and had issued a warrant for
his arrest in June 2016, the prosecutors' statement said. He was also suspected
of a role in an attack on a Tunisian border town in 2016, it said.
German
authorities had no immediate comment on a report by German news agency dpa that
Tunisia was seeking his extradition.
The Tunisian
suspect was detained in Germany in August 2016 in connection with a 2008
conviction for bodily harm, but his extradition to Tunisia fell through when
Tunisian authorities failed to provide the necessary paperwork. He had been
under surveillance since his release in November, the prosecutor said
Die Welt
reported that he was arrested on suspicion of being an Islamist militant but
was released due to insufficient evidence that he was a member of Islamic
State.
Authorities
are investigating 15 other suspects aged between 16 and 46, of whom 13 are
suspected of preparing "a serious act of violent subversion," the
Frankfurt prosecutor general said.
Among those
being investigated are a 17-year-old German-Iraqi man and a 16-year-old
German-Afghan on suspicion of taking lessons from an Islamist militant group in
how to use firearms and explosive devices.
In an
unrelated case, a 31-year-old German man was arrested near Nuremberg on
suspicion of belonging to "a radical Islamist terrorist militia" in
Syria in 2013 and 2014, according to the state prosecutor's office in
Duesseldorf.
German has
been on high alert since a failed Tunisian asylum-seeker ploughed his truck
into a Berlin Christmas market, in December, killing 12 people. He was later
shot dead by police in northern Italy.
On Wednesday,
the German cabinet approved allowing federal police to fit suspected militants
with electronic tags, a step that will need final consent from the Bundestag
(lower house of parliament).
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