Berlin – German police on Wednesday arrested a man who is suspected of planning an attack and is believed to have stored explosives at his apartment.
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The suspect is a 27-year-old German man who lived in the eastern city of Eisenhuettenstadt, Frankfurt an der Oder, police told the dpa news agency.
Brandenburg state governor Dietmar Woidke said police suspect the man was “planning an act of terrorism” and that he might have contacts to Islamic extremism, dpa reported.
Ingo Hesse, a spokesman for police in Frankfurt an der Oder, told n-tv television the man is under investigation for violations of explosives laws.
Hesse said that the man was being questioned and his apartment was being searched. Asked whether he had contacts to the Islamic extremist scene, he said that “we don’t yet have this information.”
He said police received “information that this man allegedly had explosives at his apartment; what kind is still completely unknown and what quantity too.”
The arrest comes after a string of attacks in Germany last month that put the country on edge.
Two of the attacks in a weeklong period starting July 18 were the first in Germany to be claimed by the Islamic State group: an ax rampage near Wuerzburg that wounded five and a bombing that injured 15 outside a bar in Ansbach. Both attackers, asylum-seekers who arrived over the past two years, were killed.
In two other attacks Islamic extremism is not suspected. Those attacks include the shooting by a German-Iranian 18-year-old in Munich that claimed the life of the assailant and nine others, and the fatal stabbing of a woman by a Syrian asylum-seeker at a restaurant in Reutlingen.