Police in Essen, western Germany, announced on Tuesday that they had arrested a man after receiving “indications of a possible attack scenario.”
Whether the man, who was “known to the police,” had prepared an attack was “under investigation,” police said in a brief statement, without giving any indication of his identity. He was arrested at his home in Duisburg, which was searched by the law enforcers.
According to several media reports, the man in question is a 29-year-old jihadist, Tarik S., who had been planning an attack on a pro-Israeli demonstration.
The weekly Der Spiegel and the popular Bild newspaper claimed that the police had received information from a foreign intelligence service that the man had, among other things, searched the net for pro-Israeli demonstrations and consulted jihadist content, fuelling fears that he wanted to plan an attack.
The alert was deemed sufficiently serious and Tarik S. was arrested under the Risk Prevention Act.
Police feared that the current war between Israel and Hamas could motivate this man, known as an Islamist, to commit an attack, according to the magazine’s information.
Tarik S., a German-Egyptian, had traveled to Syria via Turkey at the end of 2013, to join the Islamic State (ISIS), Der Spiegel reported.
On his return to Germany in 2016, he was arrested at Frankfurt airport, and sentenced by a juvenile court in 2017 to five years’ detention for membership of a terrorist group .
