Islamist terror plan involves killing soldiers during lunch break

A 27-year-old Syrian was arrested in Munich for allegedly planning an attack on German soldiers during their lunch break, authorities said on Friday.

The suspected radical Islamist wanted to kill as many soldiers as possible in a targeted attack in Upper Franconia near Nuremberg.

The Munich public prosecutor's office said that the man had acquired two machetes, each about 40 centimeters long, at the beginning of the month.

His plan was to carry out the attack during a soldier's lunch break in a public place.

According to official sources, the aim was to murder soldiers in broad daylight and sow insecurity among the country's population.

The arrest is the latest in a series of attacks and foiled plots involving radicalized individuals in Germany, a country that has faced numerous challenges from domestic and foreign terrorism over the past decade.

Further details on the suspect's circumstances are yet to be released – he was arrested on Thursday and brought before a judge the following day.

For reasons of German data protection law, his name was not published.

This plot followed shortly after the August 23 attack in Solingen, in which a man also linked to Islamist extremism killed three people and injured eight others in a shooting spree at a folk festival.

A 26-year-old Syrian asylum seeker who had evaded deportation from Germany to Bulgaria was arrested shortly after the attack.

The terrorist group “Islamic State” claimed responsibility for the incident, but no evidence was presented to confirm the connection.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz then promised mass deportations to reassure voters in the face of the rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), which made significant gains in recent local elections.

“We will have to do everything we can to ensure that those who are not allowed to stay in Germany are sent back and deported,” he said, adding: “We have massively expanded the possibilities for carrying out such deportations.”

In response to pressure from the extreme right, the German Interior Ministry has taken a dramatic step and temporarily reintroduced border controls in all nine neighboring countries.

This step, announced earlier this week, is valid for six months and is intended to prevent uncontrolled movement of people across the internal borders of the European Union – a hallmark of the Schengen Agreement.

The Schengen Agreement allows border-free travel between 27 European countries.

Citizens and visitors can travel, live and work in any Schengen country without the need for visas or border controls, allowing greater mobility for millions of people every year.

The controls that have been in place at the Austrian border since 2015 and at the border with Poland, the Czech Republic and Switzerland since last year now also apply to Belgium, Denmark, France, Luxembourg and the Netherlands.

The Schengen Area website states that restrictions at internal borders may only be imposed “as a last resort and in exceptional situations”.

Some neighboring countries expressed their dismay at this step, which, according to German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser, is intended to ward off “immediate threats from Islamist terrorism and serious crime.”

Earlier this week, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk described the plan as “unacceptable”.

Critics also accused Scholz and his political colleagues of pandering to a vocal minority.

“The government's intention seems to be to symbolically show Germans and potential migrants that the latter are no longer wanted here,” Marcus Engler of the German Center for Integration and Migration Research said in a statement.

This article contains reports from The Associated Press