Berlin - Germany has been put on heightened alert against suicide attacks by Islamist terrorists in the past few days, an interior official said in Berlin Friday. Germany had joined the range of targets of Islamist terrorism, he said at a news conference.
"There are links to the Afghan-Pakistan area," he said.
News reports said the greatest danger was to German soldiers, police and aid workers deployed to Afghanistan.
Thomas Steg, the German government deputy spokesman, stressed at the same news conference that there was no intelligence about a particular attack, but security agencies had to respond to general signals.
A newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, said the spotlight was on Pakistan-bound Islamists who were either German nationals or had grown up in Germany and were seen as dangerous by German anti-subversion agents.
At least two such persons had been recently arrested in Pakistan and at least 10 more had left Germany for Asia.
Another newspaper, the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, quoted August Hanning, state secretary at the Interior Ministry, saying, "We are in alarm."
It said security experts believed the danger to Germany was at its highest since 2001 when three Arab university students from the German city of Hamburg led terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.
