German prosecutors said they had foiled a suspected terror plot by an Egyptian imam and several Muslim migrants to use a vehicle to plough into a Bavarian Christmas market and kill holiday revellers.
The Islamist preacher, aged 56, was said to have aimed “to kill or injure as many people as possible” by driving a vehicle into a busy festive celebration, according to a statement by public prosecutors.
Authorities said three Moroccan men aged 22, 28 and 30 pledged to carry out the attack, while a fifth suspect, a 37-year-old Syrian, encouraged them to follow through. Four of the men were arrested near the Austrian border, north of Salzburg, according to reports by local outlet PNP. All five are presumed innocent until proven guilty.
Germany has experienced similar vehicle-ramming attacks targeting Christmas markets in recent years, including one in the eastern city of Magdeburg last year carried out by a Saudi national, and another in Berlin in 2016 by a Tunisian national. Those attacks left 19 people dead and hundreds more injured.
“The extent to which Islamist structures may have penetrated Germany gives cause for concern,” said Jens Spahn, chief whip of the Christian Democrats, in a post on X.
Investigations into the alleged plot are ongoing, with German public broadcaster BR reporting that the key intelligence tip-off came from Bavarian state intelligence services.
“There was no immediate danger to the population,” the Munich public prosecutors’ office said, adding that while the accused “wanted to carry out an attack in the Dingolfing area, there was still no specific target or date for the attack.”
Dingolfing, located about an hour’s drive northeast of Munich, is home to BMW’s largest automobile factory in Europe.
