German police raid plane for terror suspects

GERMAN police commandos arrested two Somali -born terror suspects on a KLM aircraft yesterday who are reported to have had links to a group behind a foiled 2007 plot to attack US interests.

Security forces boarded the Amsterdam-bound plane with 48 passengers on board at Cologne-Bonn at 6.55am and took a 23-year-old Somali and a 24-year-old German citizen of Somali origin into custody, police spokesman Frank Scheulen said.

He said the two men had left notes in their apartments saying they were prepared to die in “holy war” and that they had been under police surveillance for several months. The two men were not named.

“The [two] passengers were asked to get off the plane, there was a baggage inspection and then when everything had been removed a full check of the cabin took place,” a KLM spokeswoman said.

The twin-propeller Fokker 50 then took off and continued its journey as normal, she said.

The Tagesspiegel newspaper cited unnamed security sources as saying the two men — named by the paper as Abdirazak B and Omar D — wanted to fly from Amsterdam to Uganda and then to Pakistan to join the Islamic Jihad Union (IJU).

The IJU, a group with roots in Uzbekistan with ties to al-Qaida, is believed to be behind the “sauerlandgruppe,” a group of three men arrested in 2007 on suspicion of plotting attacks against US citizens and interests in Germany.

Three German converts to Islam had attended training camps in Pakistan in 2006 and were believed to belong to the IJU. The men were found with more than 700 kilos of hydrogen peroxide, the substance used in the 2005 attacks on London’s transport system that killed 56 people. The chemicals had an explosive power equivalent to 550 kilos of TNT. If confirmed that the two men arrested on yesterday also had links to the IJU, it would be the latest in a string of police actions linked to the banned group.

On September 18, police arrested two men, who prosecutors believe were recruited by Yilmaz.