Terror suspect allegedly spied on Cologne Cathedral, Ugandan president appears with Sudan’s militia leader Daglo

A 30-year-old Tajik arrested in connection with a terrorist alert in West Germany is suspected of spying on Cologne Cathedral.

“We know he was there,” security sources said Thursday. The other target of the group, to which the 30-year-old has been linked, is said to be St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna.

Security circles suspect that the group could be a terrorist cell of the Islamic State, specifically its regional branch “Khorasan Province” (ISPK), which competes with the Islamic Taliban in Afghanistan. The “Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger” had reported this earlier.

Police searched an apartment in Wesel (North Rhine-Westphalia) with special units on Christmas Eve and took five men into custody. While four of them were released, emergency services took the 30-year-old Tajik into custody “to avert danger”. The administrative court in Oberhausen confirmed that the long-term detention imposed on the 30-year-old until January 7 was admissible.

The security authorities had received information about a possible attack plan by an Islamic group in connection with New Year’s Eve. Four people have been arrested in Austria during investigations against an Islamist network.

Tajiks are said to have planned attacks before

In July, the German federal prosecutor’s office uncovered a suspected Islamist terrorist cell in North Rhine-Westphalia and arrested seven suspects. The men, who are also mainly from Tajikistan, are accused of planning attacks in Germany and supporting the terrorist organization Islamic State. They are also said to be members of the IS offshoot ‘Islamic State Khorasan Province’ (ISPK).

As early as 2019, Tajik IS terrorists in Neuss near Düsseldorf planned to kill an Islam critic. Because some of them had been under police surveillance for a long time, special units were able to prevent the assassination attempt.

The Oberlandesgericht Düsseldorf sentenced five men from Tajikistan to prison terms of between four and nine and a half years in 2022. The Tajiks came to Germany in 2015 and founded an IS terrorist cell in 2019. The Federal Court of Justice confirmed her conviction this year. (yam/sda/dpa)