ISIL ‘link’ in Germany’s arrest of Syrian pair
Extremists held in separate raids
BERLIN // German police yesterday arrested two Syrian extremists thought to be members of ISIL, one of whom is accused of slitting the throat of a regime soldier, prosecutors said.
The first man, identified only as 30-year-old Abdulmalk A, was arrested in Berlin. His 23-year-old compatriot Mousa H was arrested in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt. The men are said to have first joined ISIL, then known as Jabhat Al Nusra, in 2012 to fight the regime of president Bashar Al Assad, with Abdulmalk A commanding fighters.
He allegedly captured a Syrian army sniper in 2013 near the city of Tabqa, forced him to dig his own grave and slit his throat, the prosecutors said.
Al Nusra has since renamed itself Jabhat Fatah Al Sham after formally breaking with Al Qaeda. In mid-2013, Abdulmalk A switched allegiance to rival extremist group ISIL in his eastern home city of Deir Ezzour. He joined ISIL’s combat operations and was asked to administer the Tabqa dam, Syria’s largest, which had been captured by the militants.
Tabqa, on the banks of the Euphrates River, is on a key supply route about 55 kilometres west of Raqqa, ISIL’s last major stronghold.
The Syrian Democratic Forces, a US-backed rebel alliance, entered Tabqa last month and have since captured most of the city, but ISIL is still putting up resistance. The SDF hope to eventually take Raqqa. Germany has taken in more than 1 million asylum seekers since 2015, many of them Syrian refugees.
The country’s courts are now dealing with dozens of cases of foreign and German nationals who have fought with extremist groups that Berlin considers foreign terrorist organisations. Also yesterday , German police arrested a second soldier in a far-right plot to kill politicians, including former president Joachim Gauck, and blame the attack on Muslim asylum seekers.
The soldier, identified only as Maximilian T, 27, was stationed at the same French- German base near Strasbourg as army lieutenant Franco Albrecht, who was arrested on April 26.
Albrecht, 28, had managed to create the false identity of a Syrian fruit seller from Damascus and register himself as a refugee who was granted asylum, space in a shelter and monthly state benefits.
Their plan, say prosecutors, was to commit an attack, for which they had obtained a pistol and drawn up a hit list of pro-refugee politicians, including Mr Gauck and justice minister Heiko Maas.
The pair, along with 24-yearold student Mathias F, had hoped the murder would “be seen by the population as a terrorist act committed by a recognised refugee”, the prosecution said.