Germany's probe into alleged bio-chemical terror plot draws blank

German police acting on a tip-off from US security officials said earlier this week they had found no evidence yet of a planned bio-weapons attack during searches of properties linked to two Iranian suspects.

Police took the brothers, aged 32 and 25, into custody at the weekend in the town of Castrop-Rauxel, north-west of Dortmund, for allegedly planning an attack using cyanide and ricin with the intent of killing "an unspecified number of people," prosecutors said.

However, following searches of an apartment and two garages, there were still no indications that they could have actually procured poison for an attack, a spokesperson for the Düsseldorf Public Prosecutor's Office said.

The men remain in custody for allegedly trying to obtain cyanide and ricin. The younger of the two was serving a sentence for attempted murder at the time of his arrest, but was out on a temporary release. During the search of the garages near the 32-year-old's flat, surrounding houses were evacuated to rule out any possible danger, the spokesperson said.

A package was found that had to be examined first. However, it did not contain anything dangerous. The man is said not to have rented the garages, but to have had access to them.

The 25-year-old's address was also searched. In 2019, he had been sentenced to seven years' imprisonment for attempted murder, among other offences.

The murder charge stemmed from an incident in 2018, when he reportedly injured the driver of a car when he threw a large branch from a bridge onto a motorway at night while intoxicated.

The man was still accommodated in a rehabilitation centre in the town of Hagen, but in view of a relaxation, he was partly allowed to stay overnight with family members at the weekend. During the massive police operation that started late last Saturday, he had been in his brother's flat.

Security sources told dpa that the older brother is suspected of being a follower of a Sunni Islamist terrorist group, but was not acting on behalf of Iranian state authorities.

However, the prosecutor general's office said that prior to the tip-off about the 32-year-old from a US security agency, neither brother had come to the attention of German authorities because of Islamist activities.

Meanwhile, the region's top security official called for German authorities to make better use of internet surveillance in intelligence gathering to help prevent terrorist attacks. "The important thing is to know early on who is planning what," North Rhine Westphalia's Interior Minister Herbert Reul told German television.

He said he did not understand why Germany was so reluctant to make use of existing techniques. At the same time, he acknowledged that different countries had very different legal conditions on how they could intercept and investigate information on the net. (dpa)