Geneva on alert over suspected Daesh cell

Police carry out searches in the western Swiss city for several suspected militants

Swiss federal authorities put Geneva on a high security alert last week after getting a tip from foreign authorities about a suspected Daesh cell in the region, President Simonetta Sommaruga said yesterday.

“The Swiss government received information from a foreign authority regarding a potential Daesh cell in the Geneva area.

“Federal authorities examined this information and shared it with the local police,” Sommaruga told a news conference.

“There is currently no indication that there was a concrete attack planned.”

Geneva remained on high alert yesterday as police carried out further searches in the western Swiss city for several suspected militants believed to have links to Daesh, officials said.

Geneva, which borders France and is home to the UN’s European headquarters, ratcheted up its security Thursday after receiving information from the Swiss government about suspicious individuals in the area.

The region remains at alert-level three out of five, the cantonal government said early yesterday.

“For now, there is no change to the security situation,” said spokeswoman Emmanuelle Lo Verso, who on Thursday said police were investigating “a specific threat”, and were “actively searching” for suspects.

Intelligence

Several Swiss media reported that the intelligence originally came from the United States.

The Le Temps daily cited an unnamed source close to the case as saying US intelligence had identified three jihadist cells, in Toronto, Chicago and Geneva, and that a picture of four individuals had been circulated to police across the canton on Wednesday.

“We do not know their names, we do not know where they came from. They apparently are using noms de guerre,” the source told the paper.

The office of Switzerland’s top prosecutor meanwhile said in a statement late Thursday that it had opened a probe into “a terrorist threat in the Geneva region,” targeting unnamed individuals over possible support for banned groups, including “Al Qaida and the Islamic State”.

“The main goal is to prevent a terrorist event,” it added. In Geneva, which is almost entirely enclosed by France, authorities said the search for possible extremists was being conducted “in the context of the investigation following the Paris attacks”.

But multiple sources, who requested anonymity, said there did not appear to be a direct link with the Paris attacks.