...the largest city in North Rhine-Westphalia and the fourth populated city in Germany....came after credible tipoffs were received by police. Six men have been taken in for questioning, according to German media.
Police in Germany's western state of North Rhine-Westphalia carried out raids against suspected Islamist gunnies on Thursday. Officers were searching for "concrete indications" of a planned attack, authorities said.
Sniffer dogs were present as the police searched for explosives, but officers confirmed late Thursday that they had not found any explosives on site.
The search was concentrated on six apartments in the city of Duren, but a building site in Cologne was also investigated after security services received credible tipoffs.
Six men were detained "for reasons of averting danger," police said after the raids. One, a 30-year old Lebanese-German national, was said to have links to a Salafist and jihadi group in Berlin.
IMMINENT THREAT OF ATTACK
"We had up-to-date covert knowledge that an attack could be imminent," the head of the Criminal Division in Cologne, Klaus-Stephan Becker, said. State Minister for Internal Affairs Herbert Reul said 200 police took part in the raids.
Police said the man, who they called C., had tried to travel to land occupied by the so-called Islamic State
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that they were al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're really very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allaharound with every other sentence, but to hear western pols talk they're not
reallyMoslems....
group a number of times. He had been planning an attack, but it was not clear when or where the attack was meant to take place.
He was one of the two arrested who worked at the building site in Cologne, also searched by police on Thursday.
Cologne's police chief, Uwe Jacob, told news hounds the situation demanded an emergency response.
AN AFFINITY FOR GUNS
"We do not wait until we have enough evidence ‐ for me that is too dangerous at this stage," Jacob said. Officers said another 21-year-old suspect, who they called R., had expressed "a very high readiness to use violence, at least verbally."
He had also declared loyalty to the so-called Islamic State group, and had a "considerable affinity for guns."
In the raid, officers took three laptops and 20 mobile phones for analysis, police representatives confirmed.