Several people suspected of preparing an explosive attack, including three Syrian brothers, were arrested in Denmark and Germany, German justice and Danish intelligence announced Thursday.
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A total of thirteen arrests were made in Denmark during an operation carried out last weekend in the outer suburbs of Copenhagen, the Danish Police Intelligence Service (PET) said, also confirming an arrest in Germany.
On the Danish side, seven people were placed in pre-trial detention "
for having planned one or more terrorist attacks or participated in an attempted terrorist act
", according to PET.
Arrested during an operation carried out from Saturday to Monday, they are accused "
of having obtained ingredients and components for explosives, as well as weapons
", or of complicity in this.
Six other people "
related to the case
" were to be presented Thursday to a judge in Holbaek in the outskirts of Copenhagen, according to the same source.
According to German justice, three Syrian brothers were arrested in this case, two in Denmark and the third in Hesse, a region in central Germany.
The three men, aged 33, 36 and 40, are suspected of preparing "
an act of serious violence endangering the state
", according to the prosecutor's office in Saxony-Anhalt (eastern Germany), which does not give details.
According to the same source, the police were put last week on the trail of the three brothers after orders in January on the internet of chemicals that could be used in an explosive.
The police officers also carried out house searches, including one, in the German town of Dessau (east), led to the discovery of "
ten kilos of black powder
".
The searches carried out in Denmark also made it possible to get hold of chemical components, specifies the German prosecution.
A flag of the Islamic State group was also reportedly discovered during these searches in Denmark, according to the German weekly Der Spiegel.
Danish and German authorities did not specify any targets, nor whether they were in Denmark or Germany.
“
The case unfortunately shows that the terrorist threat against Denmark is still serious,
” Danish Justice Minister Nick Haekkerup commented on Twitter, thanking Danish police and German authorities.
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Danish intelligence, which has foiled numerous attacks in recent years, particularly linked to Danish cartoons of Mohammed, considers the threat of an attack targeting Denmark to be "
serious
", six years after a double Islamist-motivated attack in Copenhagen.
"
We believe that there are people who have the intention and the capacity to carry out attacks in Denmark
", they reaffirmed Thursday.
The German authorities are they on the alert concerning the Islamist threat weighing on Germany, particularly since a ram truck attack claimed by the Islamic State group which killed twelve people in December 2016 in Berlin, the deadliest ever committed on German soil.
Since 2009, German authorities have foiled 17 such attack attempts, the majority of which since the 2016 attack, according to the Interior Ministry.
Recently, the police dismantled in the spring of 2020 in North Rhine-Westphalia (west of Germany) a cell of suspected terrorists from Tajikistan linked to the Islamic State group, said the anti-terrorism prosecutor, Peter Frank.
Since 2013, the number of Islamists considered dangerous in Germany has increased fivefold to currently stand at 615, according to the Interior Ministry.
That of the Salafists is estimated at around 11,000, which is twice as much as in 2013.
