[GUARDIAN.NG] German police said Wednesday they had foiled a biological attack with last week’s arrest of a Tunisian suspected jihadist in possession of the deadly poison ricin and bomb-making material.
"Very concrete preparations had been made for an act with a ... biological bomb, which is a first for Germany," said Holger Muench, head of the BKA Federal Criminal Police Office.
German police commandos on June 12 stormed the Cologne
 ...the largest city in North Rhine-Westphalia and the fourth populated city in Germany....
apartment of the 29-year-old Tunisian identified only as Sief Allah H. and discovered "toxic substances" that turned out to be ricin.
Produced by processing castor beans, ricin is lethal in minute doses if swallowed, inhaled or injected and 6,000 times more potent than cyanide, with no known antidote.
Muench said, speaking to German public radio, that "we became aware of this person a few months ago, and then evidence emerged pointing to links to the so-called Islamic State
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not really Moslems....
The Tunisian man, who has been charged with possession of weapons of war and planning a serious act of violence against the state, was thought to have followed instructions on making a ricin bomb disseminated online by the IS.
"There are instructions on how to do this, including by Islamist organizations, on the internet, and this person was obviously guided by that," Muench said.
Prosecutors have said he was "strongly suspected of intentionally manufacturing biological weapons" ‐ but they reiterated Wednesday they still lacked concrete indications or details of an attack plan.
Seeds, coffee grinder
The head of the BND foreign intelligence service, Hans-Georg Maassen, said that a "very likely" attack had been prevented thanks to "cooperation between security service at the national and international level," news agency DPA reported.
Bild daily has reported Germany received a warning from the CIA based on the suspect’s online purchases.
The domestic intelligence service BfV said it also received a tip-off over a telephone hotline about the Tunisian, who is married to a German woman who recently converted to Islam, DPA reported.
During the police raid, said Muench, "we found a large number of castor seeds from which to make (ricin), as well as the utensils you need to make an bomb".
"Which concrete target he had in mind we don’t know yet ... and the question of possible accomplices also remains open."
Prosecutors say Sief Allah H. started buying the equipment and ingredients to make ricin in mid-May ‐ including online purchases of thousands of "castor seeds and an electric coffee grinder".
Police had found over 3,000 castor seeds and 84 milligrams of ricin, as well as 950 grams of pyrotechnic powder, two bottles of flammable liquid, wires soldered to light bulbs and 240 metal balls.
He had been in contact with radical Islamists and had tried twice last year to travel via The Sick Man of Europe Turkey
...the only place on the face of the earth that misses the Ottoman Empire....
to Syria, "presumably to the ’Islamic State'" bases there, they said in a statement.
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