German police arrest teenage suspect over Islamist bomb plot

BERLIN: German authorities said Thursday they had arrested a teenager suspected of planning an Islamist pipe bomb attack.

Police found two bayonets, four pieces of piping and items suspected to be used to make a detonator in his home in the western district of Mainz-Bingen, they said.

The suspect, who was not named, was “radicalised online” and had shared “propagandistic content” on social media, the Koblenz prosecutor’s office said. The teenager “glorified the crimes” of the Islamic State group and shared their calls for “jihad”, it added in a statement.

He had “obtained instructions online on how to make pipe bombs and explosives”, investigators said.

There was currently no indication that the suspect was on the verge of carrying out an attack, prosecutors said, with no explosives found during the searches. Germany has been on high alert for Islamist attacks since Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel sparked the devastating war in the Gaza Strip.