Russian Islamist charged with bomb plot in Germany

BERLIN: German prosecutors have formally charged a Russian Islamist and acquaintance of Berlin Christmas market attacker Anis Amri with plotting an explosives attack, prosecutors said on Tuesday.

The suspect, identified as Magomed-Ali C., 31, had planned an attack with Tunisian Amri, who went on to kill 12 people in his 2016 truck rampage at the market, and French jihadist Clement Baur.

Magomed-Ali C. -- who according to news site Zeit Online hails from the Russian Caucasus republic of Dagestan -- had allegedly kept TATP, a volatile explosive dubbed "mother of Satan", in a Berlin flat in October 2016.

The Russian national was arrested in August 2018 and formally charged on February 25 this year with preparing a serious act of subversive violence, prosecutors said in a statement. His joint plan with Baur, who has been jailed in France, had allegedly been to carry out "an Islamist attack in Germany to kill or maim as many people as possible" in order "to create a climate of fear and uncertainty".

The Russian -- who had come to Germany as an asylum seeker in 2011, already a militant Islamist -- is believed to have first met Baur in Belgium in 2013. By 2015, Magomed-Ali C. allegedly wanted to join the Islamic State group in Syria but was barred from leaving Germany after police in June alerted the immigration department.

He then planned to launch an attack within Germany and in July 2015 asked Baur to come to Berlin to help him. The two met Amri that year in Berlin’s Fussilet 33 mosque, which was later shuttered by authorities as a suspected meeting place for radical Islamists.