James Rothwell, The Telegraph, September 13, 2024
German police have arrested a Syrian man in Bavaria on suspicion of planning a machete attack on soldiers.
Prosecutors in Bavaria said the 27-year-old Syrian had bought two machetes as part of plans to attack Bundeswehr soldiers on their lunch break in the town of Hof.
German news site T-Online said the suspect had a radical Islamist background, and that the goal of his attack was to “unsettle and cause a stir”. He was arrested on Thursday.
The arrest came as Germany’s government seeks to toughen its stance on irregular migration and border security, after a Syrian refugee killed three people at a music festival in Solingen, West Germany, in August.
It also follows an incident in Bavaria last week where an Austrian man was shot dead outside the Israeli embassy in Munich, having turned up with a long-barreled gun.
The suspect, said to be an Islamic State supporter, exchanged fire with five German officers before he was killed.
The Israeli consulate had been closed at the time for a memorial ceremony of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre by Black September, a Palestinian armed group.
Nancy Faeser, the German interior minister, announced that from Monday there will be additional passport checks at all of the country’s land borders to increase security.
Germany already conducts such checks at its eastern borders to tackle mass migration and organised crime.
“The federal police can now apply the complete package of stationary and mobile border policing measures along the entire German border… These efforts are only possible because we have increased funding and added a thousand officers each year, and we will continue to do so,” Ms Faeser said in a statement.
“Coordinating with our neighbouring countries remains our high priority, as does minimising the impacts on commuters and on daily life in the border regions as far as possible,” she added.
