Four teenagers have been arrested in Germany after police allege they were planning a terrorist attack in the name of the Islamic state.
Three suspects — a 15-year-old girl, a 16-year-old girl and a 15-year-old boy — were arrested in North Rhine-Westphalia state in the western part of Germany, according to ABC.
Warrants for the three teens were issued over Easter weekend.
A 16-year-old boy was also arrested in Baden-Wuerttemberg in the southwestern part of the country, the German news agency dpa reported.
Officials allege that the three teens arrested in western Germany indicated they were ready to carry out an “Islamist-motivated terror attack.”
Plans for an attack were under way, but officials did not release any indication of how far along planning had progressed.
The agency dpa said no concrete attack plan had been developed.
The teens face possible charges of declaring themselves ready to commit murder and manslaughter and preparing a serious act of violence.
Bild, a German tabloid, said the group’s proposed targets included police officers and Christians inside churches, according to the Telegraph.
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The report said the teens declared their backing for the Islamic state.
Conversations about an attack pictured the use of knives, Molotov cocktails and possibly guns.
Dusseldorf, Dortmund and Cologne were cities that were targeted in the plot.
North Rhine-Westphalia state Interior Minister Herbert Reul said the 16-year-old girl wanted to leave Germany to join the Islamic State, which alerted authorities to her plans.
According to the news agency dpa, the teens discussed attacking churches and synagogues in her hometown of Iserlohn, as well as other communities, all of which helped lead police to the other suspects.
A security source told Bild: “This case exemplifies the great danger of how quickly young people can be radicalized online and then plan attacks, even those that were not previously on the radar of the security authorities.”
In March, Germany Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said that the branch of the Islamic State called ISIS-Khorasan that was responsible for a terror attack in Moscow that killed 139 people is a threat to Germany, according to Reuters.
“The threat level is still high,” Nancy Faeser said in a statement. “It was already high before the attacks in Moscow and has remained consistently high.”
