IS may be linked to Gurudwara attack in Germany: reports

The dreaded Islamic State terror group may be linked to the explosion at a gurudwara in Germany's western city of Essen, media reports said today quoting officials investigating the attack.

Suspicions of an ISIS involvement in the Saturday blast at the Nanaksar Satsang Sabha Gurdwara, which occurred at the end of a marriage ceremony, have hardened following the arrest of two men in the nearby town of Gensenkirchen. Police in Essen confirmed the arrest of the two men "after an intensive search". One of the two men identified by police as Yusuf T, an ISIS sympathiser, is now treated by investigators as the main suspect in the attack, ARD TV network reported. He is known to the authorities as an activist in the Islamist scene in the Ruhr region of North Rhine West- phalia and has been actively involved in a campaign to distribute free copies of the Quran in the German-speaking region organised by a radical Salafist sect of Islam. Yusuf also has links to "Lohberger-Brigade", an alliance of radical Islamists in the town of Dinslaken, the report said.

Most of German Islamists who have travelled to Syria to join ISIS militants had close links to LIES, the organisation behind the Quran distribution campaign, according to the report. Yusuf had used his Facebook profile to carry out propaganda for the ISIS, it said. Police investigation into the attack initially focused on a man dressed in black and wearing a mask, who was seen running away from the gurudwara soon after the explosion. Eyewitnesses who saw him without his mask described him as a dark-skinned man, possibility from the Mediterranean or North African region.