German police have announced that they have arrested three people who allegedly planned an attack against Cologne Cathedral on New Year’s Eve. The “alleged means of attack” was a car, local police said, adding that security measures had been strengthened around the church. The suspects are part of “Islamist groups”, Land Interior Minister Herbert Reul said at a press conference. An arrest for the same reasons had been made shortly before Christmas.
The three arrested are believed to be linked to a Tajik arrested on Christmas Eve, Cologne police chief Johannes Hermann said. According to the Bild newspaper, the four were all Tajiks who wanted to carry out attacks on behalf of the Islamic State-Khorasan (IS-K), a branch of ISIS in Afghanistan. “Islamic individuals and groups” are “more active than ever at this time,” warned Herbert Reul, interior minister of North Rhine-Westphalia. Investigations following the arrest of the Tajik at Christmas revealed that there was a plan to attack with a car, but “in what way is not known to us”, Cologne police said. Officers have sent out drug-sniffing dogs to search the cathedral’s underground car park for explosives, but have yet to uncover anything suspicious. However, protection measures have been significantly strengthened: since this afternoon around 1,000 police officers have been deployed to “protect the cathedral and the population in the center of Cologne”. Police expressed confidence that New Year’s Eve celebrations could continue. Germany has been on high alert in recent weeks for possible Islamist attacks. At the end of November, the head of domestic intelligence warned that the risk of such attacks was “real and higher than it has been for a long time” due to the war between Israel and Hamas. With Berlin banning the activities of the Palestinian group and related organizations, following the October 7 attack. The bloodiest attack by Islamic extremists in Germany dates back to December 2016, when an ISIS supporter crashed a truck into a Christmas market in Berlin, killing 12 people.
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2023-12-31 18:05:00
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