Apartment searched with a police dog: students arrested
Created: 05/12/2022Updated: 05/12/2022, 16:24
A police officer with a sniffer dog is standing in the suspect's entrance in Essen.
© Fabian Strauch/dpa
Experts have repeatedly warned against a scenario like this: a loner who is quietly preparing a terrorist attack.
Exactly this could have happened in a child's room in Essen.
Essen - The access takes place at 4.20 a.m.: Heavily armed special units storm into the children's room of a 16-year-old student in Essen-Borbeck.
The parents are also in the apartment and have to watch as their son is arrested.
Nevertheless, nobody was injured during the operation, as NRW Interior Minister Herbert Reul (CDU) emphasized a few hours later on Thursday.
The apartment is searched and the officers quickly come across racist, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim writing, SS runes - and bomb-making materials.
16 pipe bodies, some prepared with clocks and nails, are taken away.
"The NRW police may have prevented a nightmare today," says Reul.
The officials also find explosives, probably to fill the barrels.
The material secured so far is "functional, but not operational," says Reul.
In other words, the youngster had the ingredients for a bomb, but not yet a ready-to-ignite explosive device.
The investigators also find a self-made rifle and a crossbow with arrows.
The findings from the night have consequences for hundreds of students in Essen: in the morning they stand in front of closed doors.
The 16-year-old's Catholic Don Bosco high school and former secondary school are meticulously searched with ten explosives detection dogs.
But there is another side, says Reul: indications of massive psychological problems and suicidal thoughts of the young person.
"Nevertheless, there is no excuse for hatred of foreigners, anti-Semitism and the glorification of National Socialism," says the Minister of the Interior of the German Press Agency.
The student "is under strong suspicion of having planned an attack."
There are no indications of accomplices so far.
The youth was a blank slate for the police.
He thus fulfills the fears of terror experts, who have long warned of individual perpetrators, who are difficult for the authorities to identify in advance.
The high school student is now being investigated on suspicion of preparing a serious act of violence that is dangerous to the state.
Also for violating the Weapons and Explosives Act and for preparing an explosives explosion.
During the course of the day, the Düsseldorf public prosecutor's office responsible for terrorism takes over the investigation.
The student and his parents have to undergo lengthy interrogations.
The Minister of the Interior did not initially reveal who sent the tip to the police, which alarmed the authorities so much and called the SEK onto the scene.
It is thanks to this whistleblower and the emergency services "that worse things were prevented here." The 16-year-old had previously told him that he wanted to place a bomb in his school.
The whistleblower comes from the "social environment" of the 16-year-old, says a spokesman for the Attorney General's Office.
That doesn't mean family.
Ruhr Bishop Franz-Josef Overbeck is dismayed: "The suspicion that a student wanted to carry out an attack there by force of arms frightens me just as much as it does the students, teachers, parents, neighbors and everyone else who is affected," explained Overbeck in a statement by the diocese of Essen.
They want to “support the police in the investigation and help the school community to process the events as well as possible”.
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NRW Prime Minister Hendrik Wüst thanked the police and the whistleblower about the attack plans.
The "attentive action of the population" helped decisively in thwarting the crime, he explained.
The exact background of the fact is still to be clarified, said Wüst.
Investigators now have up to and including Friday to decide whether to apply for an arrest warrant against the youth or whether to release him again.
dpa