German police arrest Russian over alleged jihadist bomb plot

BERLIN, Germany – German police commandos on Wednesday, August 22, arrested a Russian suspected Islamist militant accused of having plotted an explosives attack in the country.

Identified only as 31-year-old Magomed-Ali C., he was allegedly an accomplice of Clement Baur, who was arrested in Marseilles shortly before the 2017 French elections accused of plotting an imminent attack.

The Russian man “is suspected of having plotted, together with Clement B., detained in France, a serious act of violence against the state,” German federal prosecutors said in a statement.

Commandos of the elite police unit GSG 9 stormed the man’s Berlin apartment in an operation which prosecutors said was linked to the Baur case.

Baur and another suspect, who had both pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group (ISIS), were arrested in April 2017 in a Marseilles apartment.

French police found an ISIS flag, a loaded Uzi sub-machine gun, two pistols, a homemade grenade and TATP, a volatile explosive dubbed “mother of Satan”.

The German prosecutors said that Magomed-Ali C. and Baur had also planned an explosives attack “at an unknown location in Germany, meant to maim or kill the greatest possible number of people”.

For this purpose, Magomed-Ali C. had kept in his Berlin flat “a substantial amount” of TATP since at least October 2016.

Those attack plans were foiled however by an unspecified German “preventive police operation”, which led the accomplices to split up and Baur to travel to France, said the prosecutors. – Rappler.com