Three alleged Islamist terrorists, two of them Germans who had converted to Islam, planned bomb attacks on a string of German cities and the main US air base in Germany, federal prosecutors said Friday. The prosecutors in Karlsruhe named the alleged target cities as Frankfurt, Dortmund, Dusseldorf, Stuttgart, Munich and Cologne. The US air base at Ramstein near Frankfurt was another potential target, they said.Police, who had bugged the plotters' communications and surreptitiously confiscated the main ingredient in the explosive, arrested the men a year ago.
If the bombing had succeeded, it would have been Germany's bloodiest experience by far of Islamist terrorism. Fritz Gelowicz, 29, Daniel Schneider, 22, both Germans, and Adem Yilmaz, 29, a Turkish national, are to be tried by a state court in Dusseldorf.
Many Germans remain shocked that the men had ordinary German upbringings, unlike the radicals who were born in Arab lands and moved to Germany to plot the September 11, 2001, suicide attacks on New York and Washington using hijacked airliners.
Police around Europe say "home-grown" terrorism has become as big a threat as that from radical immigrants.
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