TerrorismGerman intelligence foiled 2016 Islamic State terror attack
Germany’s intelligence services thwarted a 2016 Islamic State attack. A German couple traveled to Syria to try to send teams of militants back to Germany. The woman, a German convert to Islam, tried to recruit women in northern Germany to marry IS members so that they could be granted permission to enter Germany. One of the women she contacted was an informer for the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, and she alerted authorities.
Three teams of Islamic State terrorists planned to travel to Germany in 2016 to prepare for and carry out a devastating terrorist attack, in all likelihood at a music festival.
A German couple — a man, Oguz G., and woman, Marcia M. — traveled to Syria in autumn 2015 to join IS and were going to play a central role in the attack.
Süddeutsche Zeitung reports that from IS’s then-capital of Raqqa, Marcia M., a German convert to Islam, tried to recruit women in northern Germany to marry IS members so that they could be granted permission to enter Germany.
One of the women she contacted was an informer for the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, and she alerted authorities.
The case was kept under wraps until an investigation by the German broadcasters ARD and WDR, and the Süddeutsche Zeitung and Zeit newspapers. The German Federal Prosecutor’s Office confirmed the case.
“We learned of the attack plan, so we were able to able to initiate criminal proceedings in October 2016,” Public Prosecutor General Peter Frank told ARD. “For us, the facts in the case were very concrete and also credible.”
The plans were foiled both as a result of the investigation and the expulsion of IS from areas that it once occupied. Zeit reported that the German couple handed themselves in to Kurdish authorities in October 2017. Since then, they have been held in detention in northern Syria.
Reporters interviewed Oguz G. in the Kurdish prison where he is held. He comes from the German city of Hildesheim, in the northern state of Lower Saxony. He claimed to have become embroiled in the attack plan accidentally and to have tried to get out of the situation once he found out about it.
DW reports that the plot was initiated by a high-ranking IS official with the combat name Abu Mussab al Almani, possibly referring to Swiss Islamist militant Thomas C., who died in fighting in Syria.
