Terrorist Attacks Feared

The likelihood of terrorist attacks in Germany has increased, officials from the interior and foreign ministries said on Friday. Border controls have been stepped up as well as the search for possible Islamist terrorists.

"There is information about suicide bombers directed towards Germany'," a spokesman for the interior ministry said on Friday.

German Federal Crime Office head Jörg Ziercke confirmed the arrest of three Germans in Pakistan who belonged to a group of 10 German Islamists who had settled in the region of Pakistan and Afghanistan in recent months. The men were all converts to Islam who had become radicals.

Ziercke referred to a June 9 video broadcast on US TV channel ABC that showed Mansur Dadullah, the brother of a recently killed Taliban military leader, visiting a training camp in Afghanistan. In the video, Dadallah saw off four men who said they were on their way to carry out suicide attacks in the United States, Canada, Britain and Germany.

Security officials alarmed

"We are alarmed," Deputy Interior Minister August Hanning said in a meeting with journalists on Thursday evening. He also said there had been indications of possible terror attacks in Germany. "We have moved fully into the sights of the Islamic terror," he added. "We are experiencing a new quality of danger: Germany is threatened with suicide bombers," Hanning told the daily Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ).

German soldiers, police officers and humanitarian aid workers in Afghanistan were particularly at risk, the SZ reported.

An attack was carried out on a German embassy convoy of cars last weekend, foreign ministry spokesman Jens Plötner said on Friday. The personnel had made it to the embassy unhurt, but one car had been torched in the attack. Plötner refused to give further details for security reasons.

Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble said attacks on Germans, such as those in Afghanistan, could also occur within the country.

No longer abstract threats

"I think one can no longer say that we 'only' face an abstract danger," said Schäuble's Christian Democratic party colleague Wolfgang Bosbach, the party's deputy parliamentary group leader, on German news channel n-tv. Bosbach said the threats were "concrete."

Security experts have drawn a parallel to the situation in Madrid in 2004, in which a terror attack influenced national politics. Almost 200 people were killed when terrorists detonated bombs on commuter trains in the run-up to Spanish parliamentary elections, which were at the time perceived as a referendum on whether the country should keep its soldiers in Iraq. The Socialist party, which had vowed to bring the troops home, subsequently won the election and carried through on its promise.

Germany's parliament is due to vote in October on whether to renew its armed forces' mission in Afghanistan.

"Germany must continue its engagement there and should not dare to allow itself to be bombed away by criminals," Schäuble said.