Two Afghans suspected to be members of the Islamic State were arrested in Germany for planning an attack on the Swedish parliament, the federal prosecutor’s office said on Tuesday.
The two men, identified as Ibrahim MG and Ramin N, were detained in the eastern German city of Gera on suspicion of plotting the attack in retaliation for Quran burnings in the Scandinavian country, the prosecutor’s office said in a statement.
Germany’s Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said the suspects received instructions for the planned attack from an ISIS branch since the summer of 2023, and police officers were among the intended targets. The two had made concrete preparations for the attack, including researching local conditions in Stockholm. “The threat of Islamist terrorism remains acute,” Faeser said. “Islamist terrorism continues to be a particular focus of the security authorities.”
Police said the two had earlier collected about 2000 Euros for helping ISIS terrorists held in Syria. But their efforts to acquire weapons for the Stockholm attack were unsuccessful.
Sweden was rocked by a series of Quran burnings last year. The burnings, which are protected by Sweden’s freedom of speech laws, sparked outrage across much of the Muslim community and led to violent clashes, including the storming and vandalization of Sweden’s embassy in Baghdad.
Warning the country had become a “prioritised target,” security services raised Sweden’s terrorist threat level from “elevated” to “high” last August. But while ministers have condemned the burning of the Quran, they are undecided over whether to change the laws that allow it.
The ISIS, or Daesh, a jihadi terrorist group which overran large swathes of Iraq and neighbouring Syria in 2014, was defeated in Iraq in 2017 by Iraqi forces backed by a US-led military coalition, and uprooted from Syria by US-backed Kurdish forces in 2019. But a UN report published in January 2024 said “between 3,000 and 5,000 fighters” are still active across remote areas of Iraq and Syria, and continue to plot and execute attacks and ambushes.
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