German suspects had deadline for attacks - report

Three suspected Islamist militants who were planning to attack American targets in Germany had orders to act by September 15 and knew police were hot on their trail before their arrest, a magazine said yesterday.

The plan was foiled on Tuesday when police arrested two German converts to Islam and a Turk in the biggest German police investigation in the last 30 years.

According to surveillance details published in Der Spiegel magazine, the men had been given a two-week deadline for their planned strikes in a late August call from northern Pakistan that was monitored by German police.

In another detail that emerged yesterday, a spokeswoman for the Federal Prosecutor's Office in Karlsruhe confirmed a Focus magazine report that the suspects had obtained three small used vans in France and brought them to Germany.

The suspected militants, identified by German media as Fritz Gelowicz, Daniel Martin Schneider and Adem Yilmaz, had material to make bombs with power equal to 550 kilograms of TNT and were believed to be planning simultaneous car bombs across Germany.

Authorities were not immediately available to comment on the reported identities of the suspects.

Officials have said all three had trained in militant camps in Pakistan before forming a domestic cell of the "Islamic Jihad Union" - a little known Al-Qaeda-affiliated Sunni Muslim group with roots in Uzbekistan.

According to Der Spiegel, two of the militants mentioned "a disco filled with American sluts" along with airports, nightclubs or a US military base as targets during a July 20 conversation that was bugged by police.

The three suspects were aware they were under close police observation, Der Spiegel said. At one point, one of the suspects got out of a car at a traffic light, calmly walked back to an unmarked police vehicle behind him and slashed its tyres.

The arrests were the culmination of an investigation that began a year ago, when US officials alerted German authorities to e-mails intercepted from Pakistan.

US President George W. Bush was closely following the case, the magazine reported. He asked German Chancellor Angela Merkel about it in June during a G8 summit in Heiligendamm.

The police launched the raid on Tuesday after two local traffic police officers unaware of the investigation stopped two of the suspects in a routine traffic control because their car had its headlights on full beam.

Authorities have said there are at least 10 people under investigation, including the three.

A spokeswoman for the Federal Prosecutor's Office said the three suspects have remained silent in interrogations so far.

News of the arrest has shaken Germany, which has not suffered a major attack at home. Germany refused to take part in the US-led Iraq war but has some 3,000 troops stationed in Afghanistan and has been on high alert for attacks.

Die Welt newspaper yesterday quoted security sources in Germany saying there might be as many as 49 suspects.

Neither the federal police office nor federal prosecutors have commented on the details of the arrest or the probe.