Germany

A special committee of the Berlin state parliament released its comprehensive report into the December 2016 Christmas market terror attack on Monday.

The attack at the Breitscheidplatz market was the most serious act of Islamist terrorism in Germany to date. The attacker, Anis Amri, drove a truck into the market, killing 12 people. He was later shot dead by police while on the run in Italy.

The 24-year-old Tunisian national, a small-scale drug vendor and rejected asylum-seeker, was known to police and had been monitored by authorities.

BERLIN (AP) — A German woman who traveled to Syria to join the Islamic State group and whose husband bought a Yazidi woman as a slave has been charged with membership in a terror group and being an accessory to a crime against humanity, German prosecutors said Wednesday.

The indictment of Leonora M., whose full name wasn’t released because of local privacy rules, is the latest in a string of cases in Germany involving women who went to the area held by IS and were involved in holding women captured by the extremist group as slaves.

… Prosecutors said her husband bought a 33-year-old Yazidi woman as a slave in 2015 with the aim of selling her with her two small children. Leonora M., they said, cared for the woman so that she could be sold on at a profit — which she subsequently was.

Two Syrians and an Iraqi accused of beating and then gang-raping an 18-year-old in Germany have been granted bail, sparking an outcry.

The men, aged 18-21, were granted their freedom after a judge ruled there was no risk they would escape.

The men must report to police frequently, continue to live with their parents, and not approach the alleged victim, Bild reported.

The trio, who are not related by birth or marriage, all came to Germany with their families in 2015.

Police in the German state of Hesse searched multiple locations in connection with investigations involving suspected “Islamic State” extremists, local authorities said Wednesday morning.

Ten search warrants were executed across the state “on suspicion of terrorist financing and the preparation of a serious, state-endangering act of violence” early Wednesday.

The accused included eight men and two women between the ages of 20 and 51, according to a statement by the public prosecutor’s office in Frankfurt am Main and the Hessian State Criminal Police Office.

A knife attack in the German city of Wuerzburg in which three people died and six were injured had an Islamist motive, prosecutors have said. The attacker, a young Somali man, was shot and arrested by police.

“An Islamist background for the crimes is likely,” the Munich Prosecutor’s Office said in a joint statement with Bavarian police on Tuesday, describing Monday’s rampage. The perpetrator shouted “Allahu Akbar” at least two times during the incident.

Abdel-Hakim Ourghi has written books including “You Don’t Have to Wear a Headscarf” and “Reform Islam: 40 Theses.” His application to train other Islamic teachers was turned down for vague reasons.

A German Islamic scholar has had his teaching license rejected because of his “liberal theological convictions,” one of his peers told a newspaper on Saturday.

Islam expert Susanne Schröter spoke out in support of Abdel-Hakim Ourghi, who headed the Islamic Theology department at the University of Freiburg for nearly a decade.

Last month, the 53-year-old Ourghi had his “ijaza” (license to train Islamic teachers) denied by the Stiftung Sunnitischer Schulrat (Sunni School Board Foundation), based in Stuttgart.

I’m shocked! There must be some mistake!

Three people were killed in an attack in Germany on Friday by a Somali immigrant, who officials said was placed under compulsory psychiatric treatment days earlier.

The suspect was identified as a 24-year-old Somali immigrant, who was shot in the leg by police and arrested after the Friday afternoon attack in Wurzburg, Germany. Police said his life was not in danger and he was being questioned in hospital.

The knifeman killed at least three people and wounded at least five others in the street rampage at Barbarossaplatz in Wurzburg’s downtown area, according to local media reports.

As German federal elections approach on September 26, the candidates hoping to succeed Chancellor Angela Merkel are reiterating the need to thwart far-right extremism, particularly neo-Nazism, in Germany. In fact, the largest far-right extremist group in Germany is Turkish, not German, according to a new intelligence report on domestic threats to Germany’s constitutional order.

The Turkish neo-fascist movement Ülkücü (Turkish for “Idealists”) — popularly known as Grey Wolves — now has at least 11,000 active members in Germany, according to the new annual report (Verfassungsschutzbericht 2020) by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, BfV).