The Tajik who was taken into custody in Wesel is said to have been at Cologne Cathedral – to spy on him as an attack target, security circles suspect.
The 30-year-old Tajik, who was arrested in Wesel on the Lower Rhine in connection with the terrorist alarm, is suspected of having spied on Cologne Cathedral. “It is known that he was there,” said security sources. The other target of the group, to which the 30-year-old is associated, is said to be St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna.
Security circles suspect that the group could be a terrorist cell of the Islamic State, more precisely its regional branch “Khorasan Province” (ISPK), which competes with the Islamist Taliban in Afghanistan. The “Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger” had previously reported accordingly.
The security circles did not initially confirm that the 30-year-old who was taken into custody was also said to have been a contact for a suspected IS terrorist cell that was arrested in July, as the Kölner Zeitung reports. For the security authorities in North Rhine-Westphalia, the 30-year-old was a blank slate. “He wasn’t known to us,” they said.
Attack on Cologne Cathedral on New Year’s Eve?
The police searched an apartment in Wesel with special forces on Christmas Eve and took five men into custody. While four of them were released, the emergency services took the 30-year-old Tajik into custody “to avert danger.” The administrative court in Oberhausen confirmed the long-term detention imposed on the 30-year-old until January 7th as permissible.
The security authorities had received information about a possible attack plan by an Islamist group related to New Year’s Eve. In Austria, four people were arrested during investigations against an Islamist network.
Multiple arrests in the past
Last July, the Federal Prosecutor’s Office in North Rhine-Westphalia uncovered a suspected Islamist terrorist cell and had seven suspects arrested. The men, who also come primarily from Tajikistan, are accused of planning attacks in Germany and supporting the terrorist organization Islamic State. They are also said to be members of the IS offshoot “Islamic State Khorasan Province” (ISPK).
Tajik IS terrorists had already planned to murder an Islam critic in Neuss near Düsseldorf in 2019. Because some of them had been under surveillance by the police for a long time, special forces were able to prevent the assassination attempt.
The Düsseldorf Higher Regional Court sentenced five men from Tajikistan to prison sentences of between four and nine and a half years in 2022. The Tajiks came to Germany in 2015 and founded an IS terrorist cell in 2019. The Federal Court of Justice confirmed her conviction this year.
Source: Stern
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