Germany

Police detain 32-year-old in town near Dortmund after tipoff from foreign agency believed to be the FBI

German police have arrested an Iranian man suspected of planning a chemical attack motivated by Islamic extremism.

The 32-year-old was seized at his flat shortly before midnight on Saturday in the town of Castrop-Rauxel, close to Dortmund in western Germany. The arrest followed a tip-off from a foreign intelligence agency that the man had obtained toxins, including cyanide and ricin, with which he planned to carry out a terror attack, authorities said on Sunday.

Another man, believed to be the man’s brother, was also detained. He was known to police but not for his links to terrorism, and it is as yet unclear whether he was involved in the plot.

He urged lawmakers to seriously consider why New Year’s Eve ‘celebrations’ have become increasingly violent over the years, in the same places with the same participants.

Following an outbreak of riots across multiple cities on New Year’s Eve which saw, among other things, cars set alight as well as police and firefighters attacked, a top politician from Germany’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party blamed the government’s failure to integrate the exceptionally large number of migrants and asylum seekers who have come to the country in recent years.

Over the last decade, Germans have greeted New Year’s Eve with more and more trepidation. On what is meant to be a day of celebration, in Germany it shines a light on something much uglier: the country’s failed migration and integration policies.

This year, violence against police and firefighters, especially in Berlin and other cities, broke out. Unfortunately, the German government is attempting to deflect from the uncomfortable truth that non-integrated migrants and asylum seekers tend to be at the centre of these incidents. This was exemplified by the reporting of one of the largest public broadcasters and the German Police Union who claimed that it is “difficult to talk about perpetrators because these are group dynamic processes as a consequence of the pandemic” — carefully avoiding any mention of the demographic groups involved.

… While the suspects have yet to be formally identified, the national head of the German Police Union (DPoIG) Rainer Wendt told Focus magazine: “The prevailing impression among the emergency services staff is that groups of young men with immigrant backgrounds took part in the riots to a disproportionately large extent.”

This was echoed by Herbert Reul the conservative interior minister of the most populous state of North-Rhine Westphalia who was quoted in the mass-circulation tabloid BILD, and former federal health minister Jens Spahn also of the center-right Christian Democrats (CDU), who took the opportunity to call for a rethink of immigration policy.

Above- literally the last two paragraphs of the article.

The 28-year-old pulled a knife on four passengers on a high-speed train in the southern state of Bavaria last November. The trial focused on whether his attack was motivated by Islamic extremism or schizophrenia.

… Presiding judge Jochen Boesl rejected a defense of mental illness on the basis of seven expert evaluations and identified a jihadist motive for the crime.

Boesl said the defendant had frequently listened to radio programs “with Islamist content” and from May 2021 “at the latest” began envisioning “taking part in jihad, or armed combat.”

“These views led him to this act,” Boesl said. “He wanted to kill non-Muslim passengers because they were in his view non-believers and thus had no right to live.”