German police in crackdown on Salafists
Merkel defends refugee stance after attacks
BERLIN, July 28, (Agencies): German police have searched a mosque and eight apartments in Hildesheim that are believed to be a hotbed of a radical Salafist community, the interior minister of the northern state of Lower Saxony said on Thursday.
Germany is on high alert after a spate of attacks since July 18 left 15 people dead — including four attackers — and dozens injured. Two assailants, a Syrian asylum seeker and a refugee from either Pakistan or Afghanistan, had links to Islamist militancy, officials say.
Interior Minister Boris Pistorius said in a statement that up to 400 police — including mobile squads and a special forces police commando — were involved in the raids on Wednesday in the Hildesheim area, which is a short drive south of Hanover.
“The German-speaking Islamic circle (DIK) in Hildesheim is a nationwide hot-spot of the radical Salafist scene that Lower Saxony security authorities have been monitoring for a long time,” the state official said.
Pistorius said the search followed months of planning and was an important step towards banning the association, which security authorities say has radicalised Muslims and encouraged them to take part in jihad in combat zones.
Numerous members of the mosque have travelled to Syria and Iraq to join Islamic State, while sermons, seminars and speeches call for “hate against non-believers,” the ministry said.
Sympathisers
Germany has seen sharp increases in the number of ultra-conservative Islamists known as Salafists in recent years, with the total number of sympathisers now seen at 8,900, up from 7,000 at the end of 2014, German officials have said.
Meanwhile, German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Thursday rebuffed calls to reverse her welcoming stance toward refugees in the wake of a series of brutal attacks in the country.
Merkel, who interrupted a summer holiday to face the media in Berlin, said the four assaults within a week were “shocking, oppressive and depressing” but not a sign that authorities had lost control.
The German leader said the assailants “wanted to undermine our sense of community, our openness and our willingness to help people in need”.
“We firmly reject this,” she said at a wide-ranging news conference.
Merkel repeated her rallying cry from last year when she opened the borders to people fleeing war and persecution, many from Syria, which brought nearly 1.1 million migrants and refugees to the country in 2015.
“I am still convinced today that ‘we can do it’ — it is our historic duty and this is a historic challenge in times of globalisation,” she said.
“We have already achieved very, very much in the last 11 months.”
Merkel was speaking after a axe rampage, a shooting spree, a knife attack and a suicide bombing stunned Germany, leaving 13 dead, including three assailants, and dozens wounded.
Three of the four attackers were asylum seekers, and two of the assaults were claimed by the Islamic State group.
Merkel said that she would not allow jihadists, following a series of deadly attacks in France, Belgium, Turkey and the US state of Florida as well as Germany, to keep her government from being guided by reason and compassion.
“Despite the great unease these events inspire, fear can’t be the guide for political decisions,” she said.
“It is my deep conviction that we cannot let our way of life be destroyed.”
In related news, Bavarian officials on Thursday pledged to hire hundreds of extra police officers and urged tougher background checks on asylum-seekers as they presented an anti-terror plan following four deadly attacks in the country in a week.
Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann said his state — where three of the four attacks took place — would hire some 2,000 additional police officers by 2020, improve police officers’ equipment and create new offices to fight Muslim extremism and cybercrime.
He also called for tougher background checks on asylum-seekers and new strategies to deport criminal asylum-seekers more easily. Three of the four attacks were committed by asylum-seekers.
“The threat of Salafist terrorism has arrived in Europe, in Germany, but also in Bavaria,” Bavarian Justice Minister Winfried Bausback said at a news conference with Herrmann.
Meanwhile, German police on Wednesday arrested a 19-year-old Algerian refugee who had fled a psychiatric facility earlier in the day yelling, “I’ll blow you up,” ending the latest in a string of incidents that have set the country’s nerves on edge.
German federal police arrested the asylum-seeker at the Bremen main train station after an hours-long manhunt that prompted the evacuation of a Bremen shopping centre, according to police in the neighbouring state of Lower Saxony.
They said an investigation was continuing. Police said that when the man was in custody this past weekend for several thefts, he had sympathised with Islamic State and a gunman who killed nine people at a shopping centre in Munich last Friday. But they said there was no further evidence of any ties.
Germany remains on edge after a spate of attacks that have claimed 15 lives since July 18, including those of four attackers. German officials have linked two of the incidents to Islamic State.
US President Barack Obama spoke by phone with German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Wednesday to offer his condolences over the recent attacks in southern Germany, according to US and German officials.
Obama offered Germany the US government’s full support as investigations into the attacks proceed, the White House said in a statement.
Authorities had evacuated a shopping centre in Bremen, about 40 km (25 miles) from the medical facility, after people identified a man who had been acting suspiciously as the missing patient.
A spokesman in Diepholz, where the man had been held by police over the weekend, said authorities took the incident seriously given the current situation in Germany, but emphasised that there was no evidence of an imminent attack. “We only have these statements. We have no evidence of any concrete plans or even any ties to Islamic State,” he said.