Tunisian arrested over alleged ricin mass murder plot

Suspect accused of biological attack bid

German authorities have thwarted a plan by a Tunisian man who created the deadly toxin ricin and planned to use it in an Islamist extremist attack, federal prosecutors said.

Sief Allah H, whose last name was not given in line with German privacy laws, was taken into custody on Tuesday during a raid on his apartment in Cologne.

The 29- year- old was formally arrested on Wednesday after a judge reviewed the evidence.

Authorities are still investigating how the suspect planned to use the toxin, but said he was working on a “biological weapon” attack in Germany.

“We don’t know how, or how widely, the ricin was to have been distributed,” said prosecutors’ spokesman Markus Schmitt.

The suspect is believed to have begun procuring material online in mid-

“We don’t know how, or how widely, the ricin was to have been distributed”

May, prosecutors said. They say he created the toxin this month and investigators found it in the apartment search.

The substance kills the body’s cells by preventing them from creating protein. A few milligrams are enough to kill an adult if it is eaten, injected or inhaled. Early symptoms include chest pain, breathing difficulties and coughing.

The suspect is not known to have been a member of a terrorist organisation but did have contacts with extremists, Mr Schmitt said.

“He had contacts with people in the jihadist spectrum,” Mr Schmitt said, but would not elaborate on whether those contacts were online, in person or both.

He also would not comment on a report in the top-selling Bild newspaper that US intelligence tipped off German investigators after they detected the suspect’s online activity buying seeds to make ricin.

Bild also reported that the suspect bought bombmaking materials and chemicals used in the production of ricin.

It said the suspect lived in the Chorweiler neighbourhood of Cologne with his wife and four children.

He supposedly used instructions to make a ricin bomb that had been posted online by the extremist Islamic State group.

His wife was initially taken into custody but was later released.