German police charge 3 Muslims with plotting to attack Americans

Danish officials broke up a similar bomb plot with arrests Tuesday.

BERLIN (AP) — It was just a vacation cottage sitting in a small town, the quiet hometown of 900 people.

But inside, prosecutors said Wednesday, three men were readying a nefarious plot — an “imminent” bombing onslaught aimed at Americans in Germany.

The cottage didn’t provide the refuge that the trio expected, authorities said. They had been watched constantly for six months in a mammoth surveillance operation involving 300 security officers, before an elite anti-terror unit swooped down on them at the cottage Tuesday.

The men — two German converts to Islam and a Turkish citizen who prosecutors said shared a “profound hatred of U.S. citizens” — allegedly obtained military-style detonators and enough chemicals to make bombs more powerful than those that killed 191 commuters in Madrid in 2004 and 52 in London in 2005.

Frankfurt International Airport and the nearby U.S. Ramstein Air Base reportedly were the suspects’ primary targets.

Prosecutors indicated police defused the danger earlier in the investigation by stealthily substituting a harmless chemical for the raw bomb material amassed by the suspects. They said police moved when the alleged plotters seemed ready toº try to make bombs.

Tuesday arrests

Coming less than a week before the sixth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S., it was the second consecutive day that European authorities announced they had thwarted a major attack. Danish officials said Tuesday they had broken up a bomb plot by arresting six Danish citizens and two other residents with links to senior al-Qaida terrorists.

Security experts said the two purported plots are a reminder that Muslim extremists are not driven just by anger at the United States and its policies.

Islamic radicals “treat the whole Western world as their enemy,” said Tadeusz Wrobel, an analyst of military and security issues in Warsaw.

Bob Ayres, a former U.S. intelligence officer who is an analyst at Chatham House, a London think tank, said the radical ideology embraced by Islamic militants outweighs national loyalty, noting that many of those arrested in alleged European terror plots in recent years grew up here.

Prosecutors said the three men arrested in Germany underwent training at camps in Pakistan run by the Islamic Jihad Union and had formed a German cell of the al-Qaida-influenced group. Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden is believed hiding in Pakistan.

Officials described the Islamic Jihad Union as a Sunni Muslim group based in Central Asia that is an offshoot of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, an extremist organization with origins in that former Soviet state.

“This group distinguishes itself through its profound hatred of U.S. citizens,” Joerg Ziercke, head of the Federal Crime Office, Germany’s equivalent of the FBI, told reporters.

Federal Prosecutor Monika Harms said the three suspects intended to attack institutions and establishments frequented by Americans in Germany, including discos, pubs and airports. Her office said the plan was to set off car bombs.

“There was an imminent threat,” Defense Minister Franz Josef Jung told ARD broadcaster.

Germany’s government had been increasingly worried about the danger of terror plots after attacks on its troops serving in Afghanistan, and security measures had been stepped up.

Prosecutors said the three — identified only as Fritz Martin G., 28; Adem Y., 28; and Daniel Martin S., 21 — first came to the attention of police when one or more of them carried out surveillance of U.S. military facilities in Hanau, near Frankfurt, in late 2006.