Berlin - German security forces have prevented "massive bomb attacks" by arresting three Islamist terrorist suspects and seizing hundreds of kilos of chemicals, Federal Prosecutor-General Monika Harms said Wednesday. The suspects, all men, were seized on Tuesday, exactly a week before the sixth anniversary of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York.
Speaking in the city of Karlsruhe, Harms said those detained were two German converts to Islam and a Turkish Muslim. They were held shortly after midday in the small town of Oberschledorn in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia.
She said the three were members of the Islamic Jihad Union, which has its origins in Uzbekistan. They had undergone training in Pakistan during 2006.
They are being held on charges of membership of a foreign terrorist organization and of preparing a bomb attack.
Chancellor Angela Merkel paid tribute to the efforts of the security forces and said the arrests demonstrated that terrorism was "not an abstract danger but a very real threat" to Germany.
Joerg Ziercke, head of the German federal criminal police (BKA), linked the Islamic Jihad Union to al-Qaeda.
He said members of the elite police unit, the GSG9, had decided to move when it became clear the suspects had initiated their bomb making and to forestall the possibility that they might be preparing to move to another location.
State and federal police had been monitoring the men, aged between 20 and 30, for six months, he said. The indications were that they planned to detonate a series of car bombs simultaneously with the aim of causing maximum carnage.
The men were motivated by "hatred of US citizens," Ziercke said.
Two men were arrested in the house without a struggle, while a third managed to flee 300 metres before being detained by supporting police units encircling the building.
He had attempted to seize the weapon of a police officer during a struggle, and a shot had been fired, Ziercke suggested, although he added the details were not yet clear.
Harms would not identify the targets of the group but said US military facilities in Germany were to have been hit, as well as discos and restaurants.
She said the men had accumulated 12 containers containing some 730 kilos of hydrogen peroxide, from which bombs similar to those used in London in July 2005 were to be made.
They also had military detonators in their possession.
Explosives equivalent to 550 kilos of TNT could have been made, well in excess of the quantity of material used in the London attacks, which claimed more than 50 lives, although police had managed to switch some of the material making it less dangerous.
Harms stressed, however, that the men had been arrested well before they were able to make a functioning bomb.
Earlier reports, based on information from Berlin security sources, said the men had intended to hit Germany's main airport near Frankfurt and the large US airbase at Ramstein nearby.
Ziercke said monitoring the men had involved 300 officers over six months in one of the largest police operations of its kind ever seen in Germany.
He said there had been international cooperation throughout the operation and thanked the US authorities in particular.
US military authorities at the Ramstein airbase, one of the largest US military facilities in Europe, said they had no information on a pending attack.
"We cannot confirm that Ramstein was the target," Jeffrey Gradeck, press spokesman for US command in Europe (USEUCOM), said.
The German Muslim Council welcomed the arrests, calling terrorists "enemies of Islam and of humanity."
Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said there was no evidence that the arrests were linked to the arrest, also on Tuesday, of eight men in Copenhagen.
