The operation to locate the products they intended to use to make a chemical bomb is still ongoing
The younger of two Iranian brothers, aged 32 and 25, who was detained in Germany for allegedly preparing a terrorist attack involving a chemical bomb, was sentenced to seven years in prison for attempted murder in this country in 2019 and was serving a sentence out in a semi-public regime, a spokesman for the Dortmund prosecutor’s office announced on Monday. The young asylum seeker was subsequently found guilty of throwing a large tree branch off a highway bridge in July 2018, hitting a car whose driver was injured by fragments of her vehicle’s broken window. The now-terrorist suspect was drunk at the time of the events and because of his alcoholism, the judges subsequently ordered that he be committed to a rehab center after serving a year and a half in prison.
Arrested at dawn on Sunday with his older brother at a house in the town of Castrop-Rauxel, he complied with a court order at a closed center for addicts in Hagen, but was allowed to spend the weekend at a family member’s home. his progress, the prosecution explained. A spokesperson for the same indicated that his hospitalization is being reviewed every six months and that in November he was ordered to extend his stay in rehab. The two brothers are suspected of planning an attack in which they wanted to use cyanide and ricin, two highly toxic chemicals. His arrest took place amid extraordinary security measures, with officers dressed in special suits and gas masks typical of chemical and biological warfare and a large deployment of firefighters, ambulances and police.
The older of the two has been identified as Monir J. and his communications in chats tapped by the security forces suggest that he was an Islamic State sympathizer. When he applied for asylum in Germany in 2015, he claimed to be a persecuted Christian in Iran, something the German immigration authorities believed at the time. Now both brothers have been proven to be Sunni Muslims, a minority in Iran, where an ultra-religious Shia regime rules. The German authorities were informed of the attack plans by the American FBI last Christmas, according to Spiegel Online. The Federal Intelligence Office had overheard an Islamic Telegram chat group in which the brothers had been briefed on plans for bomb construction and the production of cyanide and ricin.
The first indications indicate that the two men planned to carry out an attack on New Year’s Eve, but that they had to postpone their plans because they were probably missing one of the ingredients to produce the poison they wanted to use and that it would only take them. reach well into the new year, according to sources of the research that the digital edition of the weekly magazine Der Spiegel cites. However, no hazardous chemicals were found during the search of Monir J.’s home. Police are currently searching two garages in Castrop-Rauxel that were apparently used by Monir J., after being alerted by a neighbor. As with the operation on Sunday, the area has been cordoned off and those checking the site are wearing special protective suits and masks against the dangerousness of the substances the two suspects are said to have produced.
The German Interior Minister, Nancy Faeser, has since called on the population to be alert to the danger posed by radical Islamic activists. “Our security forces are always counting on the preparations for an attack,” said the Social Democrat politician, revealing that since the year 2000, the country’s authorities foiled 21 Islamist attacks. “Islamist terrorists acting alone pose a significant threat,” said Faeser, who acknowledged that in the vast majority of cases where plans to carry out attacks in Germany have been frustrated, the warnings come from US intelligence agencies. Germany depends on the help of the secret services on behalf of Washington in the fight against terrorism, the minister admitted.
Source: La Verdad
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