A German intelligence officer was recently arrested after being accused of preparing an “Islamist plot.”
The suspect, a 51-year-old employee of the BfV, or the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, allegedly planned to bomb his employer’s headquarters in Cologne.
According to The Telegraph, German media reports that the suspect made a “partial confession” after being taken into custody.
An intelligence official speaking with Der Spiegel also indicated that the suspect shared “sensitive information about the BfV (Germany’s domestic security agency), which could lead to a threat to the office.”
A BfV spokeswoman similarly told the AFP that the suspect, who had been tasked since April with monitoring Islamist groups in Germany, had made “Islamist remarks online under a false name” and had offered “internal information during chats.”
The alleged goal of the suspect’s online communications was to recruit other Islamists to the BfV in order to strike the “non-believers” with a large-scale attack.
The suspect’s family has denied any knowledge of the plot or of the man’s conversion to the Islamic religion.
The arrest follows several recent high-profile Islamist attacks in Germany including the suicide bomb attack at a Ansback music festival, a knife attack on a train near Wuerzburg and a machete attack in the city of Reutlingen.
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