Berlin: Police have arrested two brothers on suspicion of planning to attack one of Germany's biggest shopping centres, authorities said yesterday, four days after a jihadist killed 12 people at a Berlin Christmas market.
Police said they had arrested two men, aged 28 and 31, originally from Kosovo, and were trying to establish how advanced the plot was and whether other people were involved.
Acting on a tip-off from the intelligence services, police were deployed to the shopping complex and a nearby Christmas market in the western city of Oberhausen late Thursday, they said. The mall that was targeted, CentrO, is one of the largest in Germany with around 250 shops that are usually packed in the run-up to Christmas.
The arrests come as police frantically hunt for the Tunisian suspect accused of ploughing a truck through crowds packing one of Berlin's most popular Christmas markets on Monday.
Conservative lawmaker Stephan Mayer, a critic of Merkel's liberal stance on refugees, said the case "held up a magnifying glass" to the failings of her migration policy. Germany took in more than a million refugees last year, many of them fleeing violence in Syria, North Africa and the Middle East. Neumann argued that German security services lacked the manpower to maintain around-the-clock surveillance of the 550 known radical Islamists in Germany. The government has appealed for people to carry on as normal and not to give in to fear.
