Uncertainty over Munich attack plot amid terrorism jitters

It was just a tweet, but it hit Munich like a thunderbolt. As thousands geared up to celebrate New Year’s Eve in the Bavarian capital, police sent out a terse 140-character message warning of a planned terror attack at two of the city’s train stations. “Please avoid crowds,” it said.

Soon, the stations had been evacuated and shut down, throwing local rail services into disarray, and hundreds of heavily armed police were deployed throughout the city. A grim pall was cast over one of the most raucous days in the German calendar.

The move came after a tip-off on Thursday evening – from the intelligence service of an unspecified friendly country, which German media identified as France – that militants from Iraq and Syria were planning attacks at midnight. But the enemy proved to be elusive. Police could not find the suspects and are not even sure they exist, the Munich chief of police told reporters on Friday.

The station closures capped a tense week in cities across Europe as warnings of planned terrorist atrocities soured the public mood and put a damper on the usually joyous and carefree New Year’s Eve celebrations.

The jitters reflect a growing realisation in the aftermath of November's attacks in Paris that the continent is facing a lasting and diffuse threat from jihadist militants that could disrupt the lives of millions of Europeans. This was the message conveyed by the German authorities in the wake of the Munich incident. Interior minister Thomas de Maizière described the security situation in Germany and Europe as "serious".

High threat

“Security forces anticipate that the high threat of international terrorism will persist,” he said. That echoed French president François Hollande, who said in his New Year’s Eve address that authorities were “regularly disrupting planned attacks”.

Everywhere there were signs of heightened caution. In Paris and Brussels, the traditional fireworks were cancelled. Russia, still nervous after the downing of a passenger jet over Egypt that killed 224, closed Red Square, where crowds traditionally gather on New Year's Eve. Security was higher than normal in London and Berlin.

But the enemy European authorities are facing is a shadowy, slippery one. One of the reasons the Bavarian authorities chose to act so decisively was the highly specific nature of the tip-off they received: it named not only the time of the planned assaults and their targets, but also the names and nationalities of at least half of the putative attackers. Police are now searching for between five and eight people, some of them Syrian and Iraqi. Yet Bavarian police are not even sure the people in the tip-off are actually in Munich, or Germany.

“We received names,” said Hubertus Andrä, Munich’s chief of police. But “at this point we don’t know if these names are correct, if these people even exist, or where they might be. If we knew this we would be a clear step further.”

Joachim Herrmann, Bavaria's interior minister, added that "up till now, none of us has either seen or heard of the supposed attackers".

Resemblance

In that regard, the events in Munich bear a striking resemblance to an incident in November when authorities in Hannover decided to cancel a friendly football match between Germany and

Netherlands

just 90 minutes before kick-off.

The move came after a tip-off from the intelligence service of a friendly country about a terror threat. But in the aftermath, no arrests were made, and no weapons or explosives found.

In Brussels, raids on Sunday and Monday led to the arrest of two people charged with plotting a terror attack in the city. On New Year’s Eve, six more were detained – but all were later released. Details of the case emerged slowly, but soon fitted into a familiar pattern: the raids centred on Anderlecht and Molenbeek, relatively poor districts of the city with a large Muslim population.

In Paris, the mood was quieter since the November 13th attacks. Bookings in hotels and restaurants have fallen sharply compared with 2014 and were down 30-40 per cent for this weekend, according to the Umih hotel federation. (Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2016)