German authorities said on Friday they had arrested a 27-year-old Syrian man accused of planning an attack on army soldiers using two machetes.
The suspect, an “alleged follower of a radical Islamic ideology”, was arrested on Thursday on charges of planning “a serious act of violence endangering the state”.
The man had acquired two heavy knives “around 40 centimetres in length” in recent days, prosecutors in Munich said.
He planned to “attack Bundeswehr soldiers” in the city of Hof in northern Bavaria during their lunch break, aiming “to kill as many of them as possible”, they said.
Police swooped on the suspect after they received a tip-off on Wednesday, the Bavaria region’s interior minister Joachim Herrmann said at a press conference.
The information came from a source in the “suspect’s environment”, Herrmann said, adding that there were indications that the suspect had “consumed drugs in recent years”.
The suspect’s contacts and other details as well as the alleged motive “still need to be clarified in more detail”, the minister added.
The suspect arrived in Germany as an asylum seeker in 2014, a spokesman for Munich prosecutors told German media group Funke.
According to the spokesman, he had been granted subsidiary protection in Germany and held a residence permit valid until December 2025.
German security services have been on high alert over the threat of Islamist attacks, in particular since the Gaza conflict erupted on October 7 with the Hamas attacks on Israel.
Police shot dead a man in Munich this month after he opened fire on officers in what was being treated as a suspected “terrorist attack” on the Israeli consulate in Munich.
The shootout fell on the anniversary of the kidnap and killing of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games by Palestinian militants.
The 18-year-old suspect had previously been investigated by authorities in his home country Austria on suspicion of links to an extremist group but the case had been dropped.
The incident was one of a string of attacks in Germany, which have stirred a sense of insecurity in Germany and fed a bitter debate on immigration.
Three people were killed and eight wounded last month in a suspected Islamist stabbing spree at a festival in the western city of Solingen.
The suspect in the attack, which was claimed by the Islamic State group, was a Syrian man who had been slated for deportation from Germany.
A federal interior ministry spokesman said if a radical motive was confirmed in the latest foiled attack, it would be “further evidence of the high threat posed by Islamist terrorism in Germany”.
The threat was illustrated by the Solingen attack and another stabbing in Mannheim, as well as other foiled attacks, the spokesman said In Mannheim, a policeman was left dead after a stabbing at an anti-Islam rally in the city centre in May.
Germany has responded to the attacks by taking steps to tighten immigration controls and knife laws.
The government has announced new checks along all of its borders and promised to speed up deportations of migrants who have no right to stay in Germany.
The number of people considered Islamist extremists in Germany fell slightly from 27,480 in 2022 to 27,200 last year, according to a report from the federal domestic intelligence agency.
But Interior Minister Nancy Faeser warned in August that “the threat posed by Islamist terrorism remains high”.
