Berlin - The investigation by police and prosecutors of the Islamist bomb plot aimed at US targets in Germany is likely to take months, the federal prosecutors office said Saturday. Political wrangling on how to curb a perceived serious threat to Germany from militant Islamists continued, with Justice Minister Brigitte Zypries pointing up the constitutional and technical difficulties involved.
The federal prosecutors office in Karlsruhe confirmed media reports that three suspects arrested in a small south-western German town on Tuesday had bought three small delivery vehicles second hand in France and brought them over the border.
The unconfirmed reports said investigating officers assumed the vehicles were to be used to deliver massive bombs on or around Tuesday next week to mark the sixth anniversary of the September 11 attacks.
The three arrested suspects - two German converts to Islam and a Turk - were reported to have received their instructions from Pakistan, although this too was not confirmed by the authorities.
Media reports said also that US investigators had helped track the men by monitoring internet traffic.
Federal police chief Joerg Ziercke said police were probing 49 Islamists, with around 10 being regarded as the hard core. Apart from the three arrested, two other hard-core members were still in Germany.
In most cases, police did not have sufficient evidence to justify the issuing of arrest warrants, he said.
Bu Ziercke insisted: "The danger from this cell has been cut off."
Interior ministers from Germany's 16 states met in Berlin Friday to discuss changes to the law to give police greaters powers to combat terrorism.
They agreed that measures should be taken to "remove from circulation" people who had received military training at radical Islamist camps, like those in Pakistan where the three arrested suspects are alleged to have trained last year.
But they failed to agree on precisely what measures should be taken.
There was continuing disagreement over whether to allow online searches of personal computers by police.
Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats are largely in favour, while the Social Democrats, the junior partners in her broad coalition, are generally against.
Zypries, a Social Democrat, told the Sunday edition of the mass- circulation Bild newspaper that she was not in principle against online searches, "but it first has to be established what exactly can be done technically in this complicated area."
The legal position of how to grant police permission for individual searches also had to be cleared up, "because we don't want to create uncertainty in the general public," she said.
On the question of the radicalization of Muslim converts - the issue of "home-grown terrorism" is the subject of intense debate in Germany - Zypries said she was relying on peaceloving Muslims to report signs of radicalism to the authorities.
Experts said the amount of explosive material the three had assembled would have been able to cause explosions far greater than those in London in July 2005 and in Madrid in March 2004.
Federal Prosecutor-General Monika Harms declined to be drawn on the precise targets, but indications from the security forces were that establishments frequented by US citizens, including military personnel, would have been hit by a serious of coordinated car bombs.
