German authorities said Friday they had arrested a man suspected of aiding a terrorist bomb plot, and a newspaper said he was picked up as he was leaving for a training camp in Pakistan. The federal prosecutor's office in Karlsruhe said Kadir T, aged 24, had been remanded in custody after a hearing. T is the latest accused from a group of young men, either of Turkish background or converts to Islam, who grew up amid German affluence and volunteered to join the jihadist cause.
The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper said police swooped when T left home, bound for an Islamist camp somewhere in the lawless zone along the Pakistan-Afghan border. Investigators suspect he purchased a video camera and a rifle night-vision sight which an associate delivered to the Islamic Jihad Union (IJU), a shadowy group similar to al-Qaeda.
He was linked to four men who have confessed during their current trial in Germany to plotting bomb attacks in Germany against US bases so as to spread terror among the German public. Prosecutors said T was associated with one of the plotters, Adem Yilmaz, a German national of Turkish ethnicity, who asked him in June 2007 to buy the devices. Yilmaz sent a brother, Burhan Yilmaz, to the camps with the consignment in October 2008, prosecutors said. Yilmaz and two other men were arrested in September 2007 in a country village in the German region of Sauerland