Munich on high alert
Police warn of ‘serious, imminent threat,’
BERLIN— Police in Munich warned of a “serious, imminent threat” by Islamic State group suicide bombers wanting to commit a terror attack on New Year’s Eve and asked people to stay away from the city’s main train station and a second train station in the city’s Pasing neighbourhood.
Bavaria’s Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann told reporters Thursday night at Munich’s police headquarters that authorities had received information that the terror group Islamic State was behind the threat.
Munich police president Hubertus Andrae said German authorities had been tipped off by a foreign intelligence service that Islamic State was planning attacks with five to seven suicide bombers, the German news agency dpa reported. Andrae said so far there hadn’t been any arrests.
“We’ve received concrete warnings that we cannot just sweep under the carpet,” a police spokeswoman told German media.
“Based on the information we’ve received, the warnings are being taken seriously that an attack is planned for tonight.”
Police spokesman Werner Kraus told The Associated Press that “after evaluating the situation, we started evacuating the train stations and also asked partygoers to stay away from big crowds outside.”
The warning came only hours before the city rang in the new year.
Dpa reported massive delays in the city’s public transportation system after both train stations were quickly evacuated and trains were diverted.
Police in Munich issued a series of warnings via Twitter and Facebook asking revellers to avoid large gatherings and stay away from the city’s main train station, Hauptbahnhof, as well as the Pasing station. Heavily armed police barricaded entrances to the stations.
Both train stations were reopened early Friday, and a police spokeswoman said officials would carry out spot checks on individuals.
Munich was the scene of one of the most deadly attacks in postwar Germany. A bombing in 1980 killed 13 people and injured 211 at the city’s Oktoberfest grounds. Police blamed the attack on a far-right extremist who died in the explosion.
While the latest threat sent a chill through Munich, more than a million revellers welcomed the new year at a giant open-air party in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin.
Fireworks and other pyrotechnics were banned at numerous shelters in Germany to avoid causing further trauma to the refugees that poured into the country this year from war zones in the Middle East, Asia and beyond.
Meanwhile, Belgian authorities an- nounced Thursday the arrest of a 10th person in connection with November’s terror attack in Paris, and said six others have been detained for questioning over a suspected plot to stage new attacks in Brussels during the holidays.
Law enforcement officials said there is no known connection between the two investigations, but they highlight the role of Belgium as a hotbed of Islamic radicalism in Europe.
Authorities said a Belgian national born in 1993 and identified only as Ayoub B. has been charged with terrorist murder and participation in the activities of a terrorist group for his suspected involvement in the Nov. 13 attacks in Paris, claimed by Islamic State. The man was detained Wednesday following a search in the Molenbeek neighbourhood of Brussels, where some of the Paris attackers lived, including suspected ringleader Abdel- hamid Abaaoud.
Nine people in Belgium had already been arrested in connection with the attacks, in which130 people lost their lives and hundreds more were injured.
The federal prosecutor’s office also said six people were brought in for questioning and seven searches carried out Thursday morning in various Brussels-area locations in connection with a suspected plot to stage extremist attacks over the holidays on police, soldiers and popular sites in the Belgian capital. It said a magistrate will decide whether arrest warrants should be issued against the six.
Computer materials, cellphones and equipment for airsoft, a sport that uses replica firearms to fire nonmetallic pellets, were confiscated in the searches, the prosecutor’s office said.
Previous searches in the case led to the impounding of military-style training uniforms and Islamic State propaganda material, the office has said.
Two men were arrested earlier this week in connection with the suspected holiday plot, both members of a motorcycle club. On Thursday, a judge ordered Said S., a Belgian national born in 1985, and Mohammed K., born in 1988, held for another month, the federal prosecutor’s office said.
In relation to the detention of Ayoub B. on Wednesday, police also raided a residence on Molenbeek’s Rue Delaunoy and seized “about 10 cellphones.”
The same address had also been targeted three days after the Paris attacks by police searching for suspect Salah Abdeslam, who is believed to have acted as logistician for the Nov. 13 killers and remains a fugitive. Abdeslam’s brother Brahim was also one of the suicide bombers in Paris.
The prosecutor’s office said no weapons or explosives were found in Wednesday’s search. It provided no further details, but French police reports cited by Le Monde newspaper have said the Paris attackers were in cellphone contact with two numbers in Belgium during the night of the killings.
Le Monde said the police reports show the attacks were orchestrated, or at least closely monitored, in real time, from Belgium.
Paris prosecutor’s office spokeswoman Agnes Thibault-Lecuivre confirmed to The Associated Press details released in Le Monde of the cellphone communications and activity.
They included a text message sent from a suicide bomber to a phone in Belgium moments before three gunmen stormed a rock concert in the Bataclan theatre, and Internet searches about the concert venue and the American headliner band, Eagles of Death Metal.