GERMANY: Amid fears of September 11th anniversary attacks, German officials said yesterday they had arrested a Turkish national in possession of explosives and announced the arrest in the US of an Afghan-born German citizen.
The German prosecutor's office said US authorities had arrested an Afghan-born German from the city of Hamburg, where three September 11th hijackers once lived, on suspicion of planning attacks.
The federal prosecutor's office in Karlsruhe said US officials had arrested the man in New York and said he was now being held in Virginia. It said the man travelled from Germany to the United States in mid-July and was arrested in late August.
US officials told Germany there was evidence of possible attacks planned by the 39-year-old man, the office said.
Germany was able to identify him and opened a criminal case on charges of membership of a terrorist organisation.
Hamburg has been a focus of investigations into the September 11th attacks because Mohammed Atta, the leader of the 19 hijackers, and two other "pilots" lived and studied for years in the northern port city. Police are looking for several others from Hamburg in connection with the attacks.
In a separate case, a spokeswoman in Stuttgart in south-west Germany said police had arrested a 24-year-old Turkish man near the city of Heidelberg.
ZDF television reported that officials believe the man was planning an attack on a US installation in the Heidelberg area and said he might not have been acting alone. It said he was being checked for possible links to the al-Qaeda network.
State Interior Minister Mr Thomas Schäuble said it was suspected that the man could have been planning to attack either US military facilities in Heidelberg or else the centre of the same town.
He added that a young American woman detained with him, and who is believed to have been his girlfriend, had been an employee at a supermarket in a US base in the region. The man "has the reputation of a very devout Muslim who hates Americans and Jews", he added.
The German Interior Minister, Mr Otto Schily, said on Wednesday that authorities had reviewed 500 tip-offs of possible new attacks since September 11th, but found no evidence of a concrete plot to mark the first anniversary next week of the destruction of the World Trade Centre.
"We cannot rule out that sleeper agents live even here in Germany or in Europe or elsewhere," Mr Ulrich Kersten, the head of the BKA, Germany's federal crime agency, said this week.
"What we know for sure is that in Europe and in Germany there are people who are ready to commit violence in a jihad."
Some conservatives who are running against the ruling coalition of the Chancellor, Mr Gerhard Schröder, say they expect an increase in anti-terrorism arrests ahead of a tight election on September 22nd.
"The German government would surely be happy to be able to put forward some arrests before September 22nd," a conservative member of parliament, Mr Wolfgang Bosbach, remarked this week.