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Metin Kaplan: Leader of the »Caliphate State«
Photo: Hermann J. Knippertz/AP
In a large-scale raid, 50 buildings were searched and three people arrested for violating the ban on associations.
According to the Koblenz public prosecutor's office, this is the Caliphate State organization led by Metin Kaplan.
Kaplan is said to have forwarded the organization from Turkey.
Kaplan was sentenced to four years in prison in 2000 for publicly inciting criminal offenses and was deported from Germany to Turkey in 2004.
The Caliphate State organization was banned in 2001.
In 2005, a Turkish court sentenced Kaplan to life imprisonment.
This was reduced to 17 years and six months in 2010.
Kaplan was released early from prison in 2016 because of cancer.
Information from the Rhineland-Palatinate Office for the Protection of the Constitution
The investigations are directed against a total of 41 people.
The public prosecutor's office accuses the accused of having maintained the banned "Caliphate State" association as a ringleader or having participated as a member.
In addition, non-members are said to have distributed propaganda material.
The accused are said to have made substantial income through the sale of Kaplan's writings and fundraising and food sales to maintain the association's structures.
Kaplan's son is said to have held a managerial position in the organization.
Ten suspects come from the region around Bad Kreuznach in Rhineland-Palatinate, another from North Rhine-Westphalia.
The investigations are based on a tip from the Rhineland-Palatinate Office for the Protection of the Constitution.
This gave rise to the suspicion that the organization of the "Caliphate State" was being maintained within a mosque association in Bad Kreuznach through sermons and the sale of propaganda.
The two main people responsible for the mosque in Bad Kreuznach are said to have enforced orders from Kaplan.
They would have received this directly from him.
Based on these investigations, the suspicion arose that the "Caliphate State" maintains contacts with other mosques in Germany via Bad Kreuznach.
Therefore, the investigative authorities in Celle, Lower Saxony, as well as in Munich, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt am Main, Karlsruhe and
Cologne
initiated their own investigations.
Kaplan supporters planned assassination in Turkey
In the early 2000s, the "Caliphate State" was considered the most radical Islamist group active in Germany.
Supporters of Kaplan were suspected of having planned an attack on the mausoleum of the country's founder Kemal Ataturk in 1998 to mark the 75th anniversary of modern Turkey.
At the time, the Turkish police seized three large gas cartridges and 200 kilograms of explosives.
At the time, intelligence officers estimated that Kaplan had between 1,500 and 2,000 supporters nationwide.
The Kaplan supporters are vehement opponents of Turkey's secular system, in which state and religion are separated.
Since the founding of the "caliphate state" in the early 1980s under Metin Kaplan's father, they have been pursuing the goal of "liberating" Turkey and then reestablishing the caliphate abolished by Atatürk in 1924, the religious-political state order in Islamic history.
The supporters reject democracy and call for the introduction of Islamic legal norms.
After the »Caliphate State« was banned, there were repeated reports that individual members tried to reorganize themselves.
Some high-ranking supporters of the "Caliphate State" went into hiding.
Others are withdrawing, some to the Netherlands, where the Servants of Islam foundation is a partner organization of the Kaplan Group.
Metin Kaplan himself was sentenced to four years in prison by the Düsseldorf Higher Regional Court in 2000 for publicly calling for the murder of a religious opponent.
muk/AFP
