A suspected Islamist was arrested early this morning in the Bavarian town of Hof (southern Germany) on suspicion of planning to attack soldiers of the German Bundeswehr, the Munich public prosecutor's office said on Friday.
The 27-year-old Syrian national had acquired two machetes with 40-centimeter-long blades a few days ago.
With them, the detainee intended to "kill as many soldiers as possible", according to the prosecution, which said that he planned to attack the soldiers during the break that some of them take at midday in the center of the town, close to some barracks of the Bundeswehr.
Investigators suspect that the individual He was acting under the influence of a radical Islamist ideology and that the attack was intended to cause panic and intimidate the population.
The investigating judge today ordered the defendant to be placed in preventive detention for "preparing a serious act constituting a danger to the State."
The Bavarian Central Office for Combating Extremism and Terrorism has taken over the investigation into the case.
The district chief of Hof, Oliver Bär, said in a statement that the detainee lived in a rented apartment in the area and had been granted refugee status by the Federal Agency for Migration and Asylum (BAMF) in 2015.
According to Bär, the suspect had already committed crimes and had been arrested before.
A spokesman for the Interior Ministry, Maximilian Kall, urged that the outcome of the investigation be awaited, but stressed that, If the suspicions are confirmed, the foiled attack will be another example of the "high level of threat" to which Germany is exposed due to Islamist terrorism.
Last week, a man tried to attack police officers at a police station in the western town of Linz am Rhein with a machete, but they managed to subdue him without anyone being injured, in an incident that is also being investigated for possible jihadist undertones.
In addition, A young Austrian man shot at the Israeli consulate general in Munich and against a Nazi documentation centre before being shot down by police, in what is also considered a possible Islamist attack.
Last month, an individual killed three people with a knife during a municipal festival in Solingen (west), in an attack that was later claimed by the group jihadist Islamic State (IS).
Agencies contributed to this Aurora article.