German police arrest alleged Daesh extremist in ice rink truck attack plot

 

BERLIN: German police arrested a 29-year-old man they said was an active member of Daesh who was plotting a truck attack on an ice rink.

The arrest comes a year after Anis Amri — a failed Tunisian asylum seeker with extremist links — hijacked a truck and drove it into a Christmas market in Berlin, killing 12 people.

The detention comes amid security services' warning of growing numbers of radical extremists in Germany.

“He was considering an attack on the ice rink on the Schlossplatz in Karlsruhe,” police in the south-western state of Baden-Wuerttemberg said, adding that the suspect was a German citizen whose name they gave only as Dasbar W.

“To that end, he was assessing areas around Karlsruhe Castle and, from September 2017, had begun seeking employment as a delivery driver — without success,” the police statement said.

In 2015, the suspect travelled to Iraq to fight for Daesh, receiving weapons training and working as a scout seeking potential attack targets in the city of Erbil, police said.

He returned to Germany the following year.

Before leaving for Iraq, Dasbar worked for Daesh from Germany, producing propaganda videos and proselytizing to converts in online chat rooms, police said.

Earlier this month, Germany’s security service warned that the number of followers of a radical extremist ideology had risen to an all-time high of 10,800, though the number prepared to mount attacks was in the order of hundreds.