A Tunisian man arrested in Germany on Wednesday on suspicion of recruiting for the ISIL Takfiri group is also accused of involvement in the deadly 2015 attack on the Bardo Museum in Tunis, German prosecutors said.
The 36-year-old is wanted by Tunisian authorities on suspicion of “participating in planning and carrying out” the attack.
He is also accused of involvement in the deadly Takfiri assault on the border town of Ben Guerdane last March, the prosecutor’s office in the western state of Hesse said in a statement.
Tunisian authorities issued a warrant for his arrest in June 2016, it added.
The suspect was taken into custody early Wednesday as police carried out sweeping anti-terror raids in Frankfurt and nearby towns.
“He did not offer any resistance,” Alexander Badle, a spokesman for the Frankfurt prosecutor’s office, told reporters.
In Germany, the Tunisian national is suspected of recruiting for the ISIL terrorist group and of building a network of ISIL supporters with the goal of staging an attack in the country, he added.
Plans for the attack were still “at a very early stage”, he said. “There was no concrete danger of an attack.”
The suspect arrived in Germany as an asylum seeker in August 2015, the prosecutors said, after already living in the country for a decade some years earlier.
He was arrested the following August on an outstanding 2008 conviction for causing bodily harm.
After serving a 43-day sentence, he was kept in detention awaiting deportation to Tunisia before the authorities were forced to release him again.
“As the Tunisian authorities, despite repeated reminders from the German authorities, failed to supply the necessary deportation documents within the 40-day period, the suspect was released on November 4, 2016,” the statement said.
He was kept under surveillance from the day of his release until his arrest on Wednesday, it added.
ISIL claimed responsibility for the Bardo attack during which two gunmen opened fire at the museum, killing 21 foreign tourists and a police officer.
The Ben Guerdane attack last March saw dozens of heavily armed Takfiris cross into the frontier town from Libya to launch coordinated attacks on police and army posts, killing seven civilians and 13 security personnel.
Source: AFP
