German police on Tuesday (September 13th) arrested three men with forged Syrian passports suspected of belonging to an "Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant" (ISIL) sleeper cell with links to the 2015 Paris attackers, AFP reported.
More than 200 police commandos from Germany and other states took part in pre-dawn raids at three refugee shelters in northern Germany to detain the men, suspected of either plotting an attack or awaiting orders to commit one.
The three, two of whom are teenagers, left Syria last October and arrived in Germany in mid-November, according to federal prosecutors.
Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said they apparently used the same migrant trafficking network as several of the ISIL gunmen who killed 130 people in Paris in November last year.
"There is every reason to believe that the same trafficking group used by the Paris attackers also brought the three men who were arrested to Germany," he said, adding that their forged travel documents came from "the same workshop".
He said German police had surveilled the men for months and tapped their phones.
Prosecutors said one of the men had joined ISIL in its Syrian stronghold of al-Raqa, and had received weapons and explosives training. All three had later pledged to travel to Europe in talks with an ISIL fighter who was "in charge of missions and attacks" outside the Syria-Iraq region.
The men had received mobile phones and four-figure cash sums in US dollars, as well as the fake passports, from ISIL, federal prosecutors said.
Warrants for their arrest had been issued by a federal judge on September 7th, based in part on intelligence provided by Germany's domestic security agency.
