The dreaded ISIS terror group may be linked to the explosion at a gurdwara in Germany’s western city of Essen, media reports said today quoting officials investigating the attack.
The dreaded ISIS terror group may be linked to the explosion at a gurdwara in Germany’s western city of Essen, media reports said today quoting officials investigating the attack.
Suspicions of an ISIS involvement in the Saturday blast at the Nanaksar Satsang Sabha Gurdwara, which occurred at the end of a marriage ceremony, have hardened following the arrest of two teens in the nearby town of Gelsenkirchen Wednesday night.
The police in Essen on Thursday confirmed the arrest of the two men “after an intensive search”.
One of the two teens identified by police as Yusuf T., an ISIS sympathiser, is now treated by investigators as the main suspect in the attack, ARD TV network reported.
He is known to the authorities as an activist in the Islamist scene in the Ruhr region of North Rhine Westphalia and has been actively involved in a campaign to distribute free copies of the Quran in the German-speaking region organised by a radical Salafist sect of Islam.
The blast that hit a wedding party at the entrance to the temple in the western city of Essen last Saturday injured three men, one of them seriously.
The police arrested two 16-year-olds with known links to regional Islam- ists over the attack, said city police chief Frank Richter.
“We have to presume it was a terrorist act — religiously motivated terror by the Islamist scene,” Mr Richter said in a statement, without linking the youths to a particular militant group.
One of the teenagers had turned himself in to the police, and the other had been arrested at his family home.
“We will continue to do everything possible to ensure the protection of the Sikh community in Essen,” Mr Richter said. “Our work does not end with the arrest of the two suspects. There are numerous leads that need to be evaluated.”
A 60-year-old Sikh priest was among three persons who were injured when the bomb went off in the entrance hall of the Gurdwara Nanaksar at the end of a wedding ceremony on Saturday.
