Fears of a Mumbai Redux: The Story Behind Germany's Terror Threat

• Print
• E-Mail
• Feedback

When de Maizière became Germany's interior minister, he had planned to lead the ministry in a level-headed way. For example, he prefers to use phrases such as "internal calm" rather than "internal security." And it was only six weeks ago that he uttered the sentence: "There's no cause for alarm." But, since then, the chorus of warning voices has only ballooned in size.

This change in course is the combined result of everything that happened beforehand. It might very well turn out that the alleged Indian terror squad stays home and that the raid on the Reichstag never happens. But what will remain is a well-founded supposition that there is a critical mass of terrorists in the border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan that is thinking about launching attacks in Europe -- and certainly in Germany, as well.

Raw Nerves

Given such circumstances, there is a major sense of alarm among German officials. Last Thursday, just a day after de Maizière's shocking press conference, the BKA issued a press release "in connection with the current high-risk situation." It reported that a piece of suspicious luggage had been discovered a day earlier in Windhoek, the capital of Namibia, before being loaded onto a plane bound for Germany. The laptop bag contained batteries, wires, a detonator and a clock -- in other words, all the ingredients you need for a potential airborne catastrophe.

It sounded as if another terror plot had been foiled. Had there been a plan to blow up Air Berlin Flight 7377 en route to Munich? And had the authorities, yet again, discovered an explosive device at the last minute? In the end, all the worry was unfounded. As it turned out, the piece of luggage was a test device built by a company that designs "real test" suitcases to be used to test security measures. It remains unclear who checked the bag in. But the fact that the BKA was so quick to go into alarm mode -- and publicly so -- has been a communications debacle.

Of course, these days, nobody wants to be the one that wasn't sufficiently circumspect, the one who took too long to speak up. No one wants a replay of situations like the one from the beginning of November, when de Maizière didn't know for hours whether the package that had arrived at the Chancellery contained actual explosives or was just a false alarm. Now, the threshold for sounding the alarm is already much lower.

Bonded by Fear

Of course, you can never be too sure. Over the last 12 months, a series of attacks concocted in the Afghan-Pakistani border region have been foiled in the West. For example, in May, a car bomb set in New York's Times Square by a man with ties to the Pakistani Taliban failed to properly detonate. In Copenhagen, al-Qaida had made plans to storm the offices of the Jyllands-Posten newspaper as revenge for its 2005 publishing of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad. In October 2009, David Headley, an American citizen with Pakistani roots, was arrested after having already visited the newspaper's offices in order to scout them out before the planned attack. Other targets reportedly included the subway systems of New York City and Washington.

On the other hand, absolute security is a pipe dream. For example, British authorities had even conducted rehearsals for how to respond to possible attacks. But, even so, when attacks claiming 56 lives (including those of four attackers) did strike London, on July 7, 2005, they were unable to prevent them. Likewise, US intelligence services had warned India a number of times that terrorists were planning attacks in Mumbai.

The new situation in Germany has at least had one positive side effect: For the time being, the traditionally quarrelsome interior ministers from both the state and the federal levels have refrained from their usual bickering. Following informal talks held last Thursday in Hamburg, Minister Bruch of Rhineland-Palatinate noted that he had "never experienced such harmony within this group" that has apparently been bonded together by their shared fear.

• Back
• 1
• | 2
• | 3

• Part 1: The Story Behind Germany's Terror Threat
• Part 2: An Attack Modelled after Mumbai
• Part 3: Absolute Security Remains a Pipe Dream