Germany could see a terrorist attack on the scale of the assault on a Moscow concert hall in March, German officials have warned, as the Euro 2024 football championship it is hosting neared its second week.
“Europe, and with it Germany, are in the crosshairs of jihadist organisations, in particular Isis and Isis-K,” said German interior minister Nancy Faeser in reference to the Afghan-based affiliate called Isis-Khorasan, which claimed responsibility for the March massacre at Moscow’s Crocus City Hall.
“A possible scenario is a large-scale, co-ordinated attack of the kind we recently saw in Moscow,” said Thomas Haldenwang, head of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency (BfV), adding that Isis-K was “certainly the most dangerous group”.
The warning coincides with Germany hosting the Euros, an event that officials said could provide an attractive target for jihadist terrorists.
The Isis-K propaganda organ “Voice of Khorasan” recently posted a collage showing a militant with an assault rifle in a football stadium accompanied by the words: “shoot the last goal!”
A poll by Hohenheim university found that 20 per cent of people intended to avoid public viewing events of Euro 2024 matches out of fear of terror attacks.
Haldenwang said Isis-K had succeeded in “sending its supporters to western Europe, under cover of the refugee exodus from Ukraine”.
He said the group had posted numerous propaganda videos calling on its supporters to carry out attacks on “soft targets” in Europe reminiscent of the rampages in Paris on and around the Bataclan theatre in 2015, and on the Brussels airport and metro system the following year.
“That’s the kind of thing Isis-K dreams of,” said Haldenwang.
But he stressed that “lone wolves”, such as the 25-year-old man from Afghanistan who killed a policeman and injured five others in a knife attack in the south-western city of Mannheim earlier this month, continued to be one of the biggest threats to public security.
Haldenwang said the danger of Islamist terrorism had increased since Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7 and the ensuing war in Gaza, with groups such as Isis-K inciting violence against Israel and Jews in the diaspora.
Faeser said the number of antisemitic crimes in Germany had “exploded” and people sporting Jewish insignia — such as members of the sports club Makkabi Deutschland — were often unable to go out in public “without being sworn at or attacked”.
Experts say Isis-K, which was established in Afghanistan in 2015, has increased in strength since the US withdrawal from Kabul in 2021 and has ramped up its international activities since then, despite a bloody counterinsurgency campaign by the ruling Taliban to stamp out the group
Isis-K was linked to bombings in Iran in January that killed nearly 100 people, an attack on a church in Turkey the same month and a foiled plot in March to attack Sweden’s parliament that authorities said may have been directed from Afghanistan.
According to the BfV’s annual report for 2023, the jihadist group was increasingly setting its sights on “attacks against ‘infidels’ in the west” in order to highlight its importance within Isis.
Last July German police arrested seven people suspected of being members of Isis-K. The BfV report said they were all from Central Asia and had entered Germany from Ukraine at the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of its western neighbour.
They had, it said, planned attacks and had already identified and scouted out potential targets and made attempts to procure weapons.
Earlier this month, police and prosecutors arrested a German-Moroccan-Polish national, identified only at Soufian T, who is suspected of transferring $1,675 in cryptocurrency to an Isis-K account.
Der Spiegel reported that he had tried to get a job as a steward in one of the public viewing events of the Euro 2024 event.
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