Germany hunts for main suspect in bombing plot
Print Edition
GERMAN police searched nationwide yesterday for a 22-year-old Syrian man believed to have been preparing a bomb attack, who slipped through their fingers as they were closing in on him, and were questioning a second Syrian man on suspicion he was involved in the plot.
The man in custody was one of three nabbed in the eastern city of Chemnitz on Saturday. He was the renter of the apartment that police raided in their search for the main suspect, Jaber Albakr from the Damascus area of Syria, Saxony police spokesman Tom Bernhardt said. The other two men have been released.
He said the man in custody was Albakr’s “countryman” but would not give details. “We believe he is a possible co-conspirator,” Bernhardt said.
On Saturday morning, as police prepared to raid the apartment building, Albakr was observed leaving the premises. Police fired a warning shot but were unable to stop him, Bernhardt said, confirming German media reports. They thought he had turned back into the building but was not the case, he said.
He also confirmed reports that Albakr had come to Germany in the flood of 890,000 migrants who came in 2015 and had been granted asylum.
Nobody was in the apartment when police SWAT teams blew down the door, but investigators found “several hundred grams” of a volatile explosive hidden in the flat, enough to cause significant damage, Bernhardt said.
He said experts were still trying to determine whether it was the same explosive used in the deadly November 13 attacks in Paris and the March 22 attacks in Brussels known as TATP, or triacetone triperoxide. “It’s comparable to that.”
The explosives were destroyed in a controlled detonation by bomb squad experts in a pit dug outside the five-story apartment building because they were considered too dangerous to transport.
The raid came after Saxony police were given a tip from Germany’s domestic intelligence service that Albakr may be planning an attack.
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