Police in western Germany have arrested two teenage girls and a boy on suspicion of planning an Islamist terrorist attack, prosecutors said on Friday.
The three, aged from 15 to 16, are “strongly suspected of planning an Islamist-motivated terror attack and of having committed to carrying it out,” according to a statement from prosecutors.
The suspects are from the Dusseldorf region and were allegedly “committed to carrying out a crime – murder and manslaughter.”
The Bild newspaper said the teenagers were planning an Islamic State (ISIS) attack using Molotov cocktails and knife attacks targeting Christians and police, and were considering obtaining firearms.
German police in January arrested three people over an alleged plot to attack the Cologne cathedral on New Year’s Eve.
Two Afghans with ISIS connections were arrested in Germany in March on suspicion of plotting an attack on Sweden’s parliament in retaliation for Quran burnings in the country.
Two Syrian brothers were also arrested in October for plotting an ISIS inspired attack on a church in Sweden.
The number of people on the Islamist extremist spectrum in Germany dropped from 28,290 in 2021 to 27,480 in 2022, as determined by a report from the BfV federal domestic intelligence agency, but Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said Islamist extremism “remains dangerous.”
