German police arrest two Nusra-affiliated suspects

Police in Germany have arrested two suspects over alleged links to the Takfiri al-Nusra Front terrorist group following large-scale raids across the country’s west.

The German federal prosecutor’s office said in a statement on Wednesday that the two had been apprehended in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia, where police had been conducting searches.

The suspects had allegedly been collecting donations and arranging “aid convoys” to deliver food, medicine, and medical equipment to the Takfiri group in Syria for several years, the statement said.

“Ambulance vehicles, medical devices, medicines, and foodstuffs have been delivered to Syria,” disguised as aid material under campaign called “Medicine of Heart” and “Medicine without Borders,” it added.

A spokesman for the prosecutor’s office said the investigations were still going on and refused to disclose further details about the suspects, including their names, gender, or nationalities.

Similar searches are also said to have been conducted in Britain.

Al-Nusra Front has recently renamed itself Jabhat Fateh al-Sham and claimed to have broken ranks with al-Qaeda, although the moves are widely believed to have been mere decoy tactics.

The Syrian conflict, which flared up in March 2011, has claimed the lives of more than 400,000 people, according to an August 2016 estimate by UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura.

The Wednesday arrests come as part of a crackdown by the German government on terrorist networks in the wake of a series of terror attacks in the European country since mid-last year.

Germany was rocked by a series of deadly attacks in 2016.

On July 18, an alleged teenage asylum-seeker went on a rampage on a train in the German city of Wuerzburg, severely wounding four people and injuring a woman with an axe. The Daesh terrorist group claimed responsibility for the assault.

Less than a week later, an individual set off his explosives outside a bar in the city of Ansbach, wounding 15 people.

Most recently, a Tunisian man was reported to have driven a truck into crowds of people at a Christmas market in Berlin, killing 12 people. Daesh claimed responsibility for the December 19 assault.

Meanwhile, around 1,100 German police officers conducted surprise raids on 54 properties in several cities across the country last Wednesday, nabbing 16 terrorist suspects, including a recruiter and human trafficker linked to Daesh.

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