Chris Gattringer
Police in Germany have apprehended three young men who were allegedly planning a terror attack on Christmas markets in either Frankfurt on Main or Mannheim.
The suspects – a pair of brothers with Lebanese roots aged 15 and 20 and a German-Turkish man of 22 – had already allegedly procured weapons, according to a press release on December 10 by the State Prosecution Agencies involved in the case.
Those weapons included an assault rifle, ammunition and several knives. After extensive investigations, special forces of the German police arrested the men in their apartments in Mannheim and near Frankfurt on December 8.
The prosecution alleged all three had a “consolidated religious ideology” and “deep sympathy” for Islamist terror organisation “Islamic State”. They said the suspects had talked about their alleged terror plans with acquaintances, some of whom had already been subject to anti-terrorism investigations more than 10 years ago.
According to German media reports on December 10, the two brothers, both of whom were born in Germany, allegedly acquired the assault rifle in Frankfurt’s railway station district from a person affiliated with organised crime.
Thomas Strobl, the Conservative interior minister of Baden-Wurttemberg, the German State where Mannheim is located, called the arrests “an impressive example for the effective and consequent work of our security agencies”.
Mannheim, an industrial city with a high proportion of migrants, has been in the news recently as the site of another alleged Islamist terror attack.
On May 31, 2024, an Afghan immigrant was alleged to have stabbed a police officer to death and attacked Michael Stürzenberger, a prominent critic of political Islam. Stürzenberger survived the assualt gravely injured.
German Christmas markets have been the target of Islamist terrorists before. In one of the the worst attacks, in December 2016, a Tunisian man with ties to IS drove a hijacked lorry into a Christmas market crowd on Breitscheidplatz in Berlin, killing 13 people.
In December 2024, German police arrested an Iraqi asylum seeker suspected of having ties to IS who had allegedly been planning an attack on the Christmas market in Augsburg, Bavaria.
Amid the apparent threat of terror attacks, some German cities are now heavily fortifying their Christmas markets.
In Quedlinburg in the State of Saxony-Anhalt, the Christmas market has been surrounded with heavy concrete blocks.
They have been dubbed “Merkel Stones” on social media – a play on former chancellor Angela Merkel’s 2015 decision to open Germany’s borders to immigrants from predominantly Muslim countries.