A man, believed to be an “ISIS sleeper agent” has been arrested in Germany over a suspected terror plot during Euro 2024.
The man, Mahmoud A., who is believed to be Iraqi, was taken into custody on Wednesday in the town of Esslingen on the outskirts of Stuttgart after being arrested on suspicion of preparing a terrorist attack on behalf of the terror group.
According to investigators, he arrived in Germany in October 2022, but is believed to have been affiliated with ISIS since 2016.
It’s not yet clear how he managed to gain entry to the country given his alleged links to the group.
Germany’s Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said the arrest showed the nation’s commitment to stamp out the threat posed by ISIS saying: “Our security authorities are extremely vigilant, follow every tip-off and strike hard to protect our country.”
On Tuesday, Germany’s interior ministry had warned at a press conference that the country was “in the crosshairs of jihadist organisations, in particular ISIS and ISIS-K.”
The department said the danger of Islamist terrorism had risen since Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7 and the war in Gaza that followed.
The head of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency (BfV), Thomas Haldenwang, added: “A possible scenario is a large-scale, co-ordinated attack of the kind we recently saw in Moscow.”
He said that ISIS-K, which carried out the attack in Russia, was “certainly the most dangerous group” and had succeeded in “sending its supporters to western Europe, under cover of the refugee exodus from Ukraine”.
The intelligence chief revealed the organisation had been urging its members to carry out mass terror attacks on “soft targets” in Europe.
He also emphasised that so-called “lone wolves” continued to pose one of the biggest threats to public security.
Germany has deployed 22,000 police officers to reinforce border, railway and airport security for the duration of the four-week tournament. Berlin has also drafted in officers from overseas, to help keep fans safe.
The warning came after a series of attacks carried out by individuals which have shaken the country. A police officer was stabbed to death and several other people were injured by an Afghan knifeman at an anti-Islam rally in Mannheim at the end of last month.
On Friday evening, German police in Wolmirstedt, a town close to the capital, shot dead another Afghan attacker who killed a compatriot and wounded three others at a viewing party for the tournament’s opening match.
And at the weekend, German police were also reportedly forced to shoot an axe-wielding man who was allegedly holding a Molotov cocktail at a fan-zone in Hamburg.