German police have launched an international hunt for 10 accomplices of the three men held over a foiled Islamist plot to blow up airports and US installations in Germany, a top official said Thursday.
"Terrorist attacks need preparation. We are trying to identify all of those who were working in the shadows," Deputy Interior Minister August Hanning told ARD television. Police were searching for "the 10 people who were behind this" within Germany and abroad, he added. Anti-terrorist police on Tuesday arrested two German converts to Islam and a Turk who they said had stockpiled more than 700 kilogrammes (1,500 pounds) of chemicals to use in "massive" attacks on US targets.
Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble described the men as "very dangerous terrorists". He said they belonged to the Islamic Jihad Union, a group with links to al Qaeda, and had undergone training in Pakistan last year. Hanning said the suspects still at large were of German, Turkish and other nationalities.
The three main suspects were arrested by members of Germany's GSG9 anti-terrorist unit in a raid on a rented two-storey house with a manicured garden in the Sauerland area near Frankfurt.
According to Hanning, police were "speculating" that Frankfurt's busy international airport may have been among the places they were planning to target in attacks potentially as deadly as those on the public transport systems of Madrid in 2004 and London in 2005. Those attacks killed a total of 234 people. Federal prosecutors identified the men as Fritz Martin G., a 28-year-old German, Daniel Martin S., 21 and also German, and Adem Y., a 28-year-old Turk.
Newspapers reported on Thursday that investigators believed Fritz Martin G. to have been the ringleader of the plotters. He had been living in Neu-Ulm, a town in southern Germany seen as a hotbed of Islamist radicals, and was involved in a mosque there which German police have long believed to be a base for extremists planning attacks.
Investigators said an Islamic centre in nearby Ulm was among more than 30 places the police raided early Wednesday. Offices seized documents and computers they hope can point them to those who helped to organise and finance the well-advanced bomb plot.
The three main suspects, pictured in the press wearing blue prisoner overalls, appeared before an investigating judge in Karlsruhe in south-western Germany on Wednesday. The authorities have said the men gathered at their Sauerland hideaway on Sunday to start making bombs to use in "massive attacks" with the 12 drums of hydrogen peroxide they had stashed in the garage.
Sources close to the case told AFP the police were looking into the group's plans to use military detonators to set off bombs because this could provide important clues in the investigation. German officials said they remained concerned about possible extremist violence, though an imminent danger might have been averted.
"The underlying threat is still there and it is worrying us," Hanning said.
The discovery of the alleged plot saw a call on Thursday for authorities to be allowed keep a close watch on new converts to Islam. "Converts tend to want to prove their commitment to their new faith by behaving in a fanatical way," said Guenther Beckstein, the conservative interior minister of the southern state of Bavaria.
Commentators said the plot vindicated German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaueble's repeated warnings that the country was not merely a base for Islamist extremists but at real risk of attacks on its soil. The September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States were in part planned in Germany by al Qaeda operatives based in the northern port of Hamburg.
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