Germany: 12-year-old Muslim arrested for plotting terror attack on Christmas market
Boy, 12, dubbed the ‘Kindergarten Bomber’ becomes youngest person in Europe to be arrested for terror offences after ‘planning to attack a Christmas market in Germany’
- Boy has been dubbed ‘The Kindergarten Bomber’ and was ‘brainwashed by ISIS’
- He had planned to detonate a nail bomb on November 26 but it malfunctioned
- The boy tried again at the Ludwigshafen Christmas Market on December 5
- This time a passer-by spotted him and the German bomb squad were called in
A 12-year-old child dubbed ‘The
Kindergarten Bomber’ has been arrested in Germany accused of plotting to
blow up a Christmas market.
The boy, who has dual German-Iraqi citizenship, is the youngest ever to be seized in Europe for a suspected terror offence.
The child was ‘strongly radicalised’ in
recent weeks by a member of the Islamic State and planned to detonate
his nail bomb on November 26 but it failed to explode, according to
local sources.
He or someone else had assembled a device
made from gunpowder surrounded with nails and screws designed to cause
maximum casualties when it went off, according to Focus Magazine.
He placed it in bushes near the to the Ludwigshafen Christmas market, but it failed to go off.
He tried again on December 5, this time placing it in different shrubbery near the city hall, according to Focus.
An eagle-eyed passer-by saw what he was
doing and contacted police and the specialist explosive squad was
brought in to carry out a controlled explosion.
The boy, born in the city in 2004, was seized the same day and has been remanded in a juvenile detention centre.
Police in the city referred all media
enquiries to the office of the German attorney general in Karlsruhe
where there was no immediate comment.
According to Focus – known in Germany for a
magazine with close ties to and sources within the security services –
the bomb was in a glass jam jar and the nails and screws were glued to
the sides.
But police investigators determined that
the explosive material used in the child’s bomb been created out of the
ingredients of fireworks and sparklers and was flammable but not
explosive.
On Thursday, in a separate case,
prosecutors said a Tunisian man suspected of planning an unspecified
mission for ISIS was arrested.
Charfeddine T, 24, allegedly joined the
terror group before he arrived in Germany in October 2015, the
prosecutors’ statement said.
They obtained an arrest warrant against him on Wednesday, accusing him of membership of a foreign terrorist organisation.
He had been in contact with an ISIS member
in Syria responsible for running the group’s operations abroad and had
‘requested permission to carry out his mission’.
‘Investigations so far have not confirmed whether it was to carry out an attack,’ said the federal prosecutors.
The attempted slaughter illustrates the spiking terror threat in Germany.
Returnees from the ranks of Isis in the
Middle East have told intelligence services that it is the group’s main
target in Europe.
Germany has been rocked by terror attacks
this year, heaping pressure on chancellor Angela Merkel’s open-door
immigration policy.
A bloody week of violence that rocked
Germany began on July 18 when Pakistani teenager Riaz Khan Ahmadzai, 17,
posing as an Afghan refugee, hacked at passengers on a train in
Wurzburg with an axe, wounding five.
He was shot dead by police.
Four days later mentally unstable
German-Iranian teenager Ali Sonboly shot nine people dead during a
rampage through a shopping centre in Munich before taking his own life.
Sonboly claimed he was taking revenge for being bullied at school with no political motive to the murderous rampage.
In October, Police in have stormed 13
buildings across the country after reports ISIS terrorists were planning
an imminent attack.
Anti-terror raids were launched on houses
in Thuringia, Hamburg, North Rhine-Westphalia, Saxony and Bavaria as
officers believed the threat was credible.
Armed police accompanied by sniffer dogs conducted the raids after being sent to look for weapons and explosives.
The operation came as part of
an investigation into a 28-year-old Russian citizen of Chechen
background suspected of intending to join the fighting in Syria on
behalf of ISIS.
The investigation later developed into a
probe of 13 further individuals, 10 men and three women, suspected of
financing extremist activity.
Police said all were people of Chechen
ethnicity with Russian citizenship seeking asylum in Germany, and whose
status has not yet been decided.
Earlier that month, a suspected ISIS
airport bomb plotter hanged himself in a German prison after being
arrested following a manhunt.
Syrian national Jaber al-Bakr, 22, was
found hanged in his cell in Leipzig, eastern Germany on Wednesday
evening – having reportedly used his own t-shirt – and was taken away
overnight.
He was detained on Sunday after three days
on the run following a tip-off that he may have been looking to team up
with associates in Leipzig.
Al-Bakr had built ‘a virtual bomb-making
lab’ in a flat in Chemnitz and was thought to have planned an attack
against either one of Berlin’s two airports or a transport hub in his
home state of Saxony, security sources said.
Chemnitz was on lockdown for hours when
police raided his flat but failed to seize him before he was captured by
fellow Syrian nationals who tied him up and handed him over to the
authorities.
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