Germany

Mosques in Cologne, including Germany’s largest, will be permitted to broadcast the call to prayer over loudspeakers every Friday afternoon.

The news comes after an agreement was made between the city of Cologne and the Muslim community to ease restrictions, which the city’s mayor announced Monday.

However, the decision has prompted a backlash from some corners of Germany, with one expert contradicting the mayor’s claim the initiative was about diversity, instead calling the call to prayer ‘a show of power.’

… According to police, the large-scale operation was directed against 67 suspected members of a network that has been operating internationally since 2016.

They allegedly provided illicit payment services and laundered funds from criminal acts.

The majority of the 67 suspects are Syrian nationals. The remaining suspects have either German, Jordanian, Lebanese, Turkish or Ukrainian citizenship, Reul said.

Two of the arrested suspects had previously been classified as Islamist threats.

Police in the German city of Hagen announced on Thursday that they have arrested four suspects, after a significant police force was deployed near a synagogue on Wednesday amid concerns about a possible attack.

In response to the reported risk to the synagogue, police imposed restrictions on traffic and pedestrians outside the religious site and surrounding area, with officers also searching several buildings as part of their investigation. The synagogue was forced to cancel an event due to the security situation.

Sven Kurenbach still remembers the images of the twin towers of the World Trade Center collapsing and the spontaneous minute of silence at the Berlin police department that followed. When Islamist terrorists weaponized passenger planes on September 11, 2001 — killing nearly 3,000 people — Kurenbach was still head of inspection for the Berlin police’s special units. Today he is Germany’s top investigator into jihadist activities.

Twenty years ago, Islamist terror was still largely an unknown for German security authorities, Kurenbach recalled recently at an event organized by “Mediendienst Integration” in Berlin. Just a dozen officers at the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) had been dealing with it.

German federal prosecutors arrested a woman on Monday suspected of collecting money for the extremist “Islamic State” (IS) group and helping with bank transfers to the Middle East.

The suspect, identified only as Denise S., is thought to have been in contact with female IS members to keep them informed on money being sent to the group.

She is also accused of collecting donations for a woman member to enable her to return to the group after her detention in a Kurdish refugee camp.

A special committee of the Berlin state parliament released its comprehensive report into the December 2016 Christmas market terror attack on Monday.

The attack at the Breitscheidplatz market was the most serious act of Islamist terrorism in Germany to date. The attacker, Anis Amri, drove a truck into the market, killing 12 people. He was later shot dead by police while on the run in Italy.

The 24-year-old Tunisian national, a small-scale drug vendor and rejected asylum-seeker, was known to police and had been monitored by authorities.

BERLIN (AP) — A German woman who traveled to Syria to join the Islamic State group and whose husband bought a Yazidi woman as a slave has been charged with membership in a terror group and being an accessory to a crime against humanity, German prosecutors said Wednesday.

The indictment of Leonora M., whose full name wasn’t released because of local privacy rules, is the latest in a string of cases in Germany involving women who went to the area held by IS and were involved in holding women captured by the extremist group as slaves.

… Prosecutors said her husband bought a 33-year-old Yazidi woman as a slave in 2015 with the aim of selling her with her two small children. Leonora M., they said, cared for the woman so that she could be sold on at a profit — which she subsequently was.

Two Syrians and an Iraqi accused of beating and then gang-raping an 18-year-old in Germany have been granted bail, sparking an outcry.

The men, aged 18-21, were granted their freedom after a judge ruled there was no risk they would escape.

The men must report to police frequently, continue to live with their parents, and not approach the alleged victim, Bild reported.

The trio, who are not related by birth or marriage, all came to Germany with their families in 2015.