BERLIN — German law-enforcement officials said on Saturday that they were looking for two suspected terrorists thought to be in or around the capital city in one of several investigations aimed at thwarting what the authorities believe are myriad plans by Islamic radicals to attack the nation.
They have information that two men entered Germany six to eight weeks ago from Waziristan, in Pakistan, and were awaiting delivery of detonators, perhaps from Turkey, to carry out an attack, a German security official said.
Aspects of this suspected plot were reported in several German news outlets on Saturday, including on ARD television, which said that the attackers “are rotating their accommodation, staying in the homes of other people, are living together, not using the telephone, not going to the mosque and making sure they are dressed in Western clothes.”
Police and government officials said this week they have concrete information of plans for a terrorist attack by the end of the year and so have stepped up their counterterrorism efforts. The police and investigators are closely monitoring cross-border traffic and have sent heavily armed police officers and bomb-detecting dogs to transportation hubs, popular sites, and government and parliamentary offices.
Even before the government said there was a high probability of an attack, law enforcement officials and terrorism experts here said they feared that terrorists were planning a Mumbai-style attack, sending small teams of armed militants to rampage through so-called soft targets.
Though this most recent warning focused on terrorists crossing into the country, terrorism experts and government officials here say they are also worried about local people — German citizens — who may be radicalized and may be laying in wait to carrying out an attack.
“The threat is nationalizing, the networks are nationalizing and our security services are having big problems coming to terms with the evolution of this new threat,” said Guido Steinberg, an expert in Islamic radicalism with the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.
As German law-enforcement officials worked around the clock and the police were told to cancel holiday vacation plans to preserve the beefed up security on the street, officials inNamibia announced that it appeared terrorists were not involved with planting a dummy bomb among baggage heading onto a flight for Munich.
The nation’s police commander, Lt. Gen. Sebastian Ndeitunga, said a senior Namibian aviation security officer had been arrested in connection with the mock bomb found Wednesday in a laptop case at the airport there.
But, he said, the investigation was just beginning into how the device, which was made by a California company to test airport security, ended up at an airport halfway around the world.
“We’re still trying to establish the motive behind this mess,” he said.
The officer was arrested after a review of closed-circuit camera surveillance, General Ndeitunga said. The suspect, whose name will be kept secret until Monday, confessed to some involvement in the case, the general said.
General Ndeitunga said the possibility that the security officer had accomplices had not been ruled out.
The general sounded angry as he told reporters on Saturday that the officer in custody had “tarnished the reputation of the Namibian security forces.”
“We do not consider this to be a joke,” he said.
John Grobler contributed reporting from Windhoek, Namibia, and Souad Mekhennet from Marrakech, Morocco.
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