GERMAN POLICE ARREST MAN LINKED TO DEADLY BARDO MUSEUM ATTACK

German prosecutors announced that a thirty-six-year-old Tunisian man, arrested in Frankfurt on Wednesday, February 1, for ISIS recruiting and planning terrorist attacks, is also being held for his involvement in the deadly 2015 attack on the Bardo National Museum in Tunis, Monopol reports.

ISIS claimed credit for the March 2015 museum attack, which killed twenty-one people, mostly European tourists (a twenty-second victim died ten days later). Tunisian police killed two of the gunmen during the assault, but the third attacker managed to escape. Tunisian authorities issued an arrest warrant for the suspect on suspicion of “participating in planning and carrying out” the Bardo attack, as well as a deadly jihadist assault on the border town of Ben Guerdane last March, according to a statement released by the Hessen state prosecutor’s office.

The suspect had Germany residency after traveling there, seeking asylum, in 2003. He left Germany in 2013, returned in 2015, was arrested in August 2016 because of an earlier conviction for non-terror related violence in Tunisia, and was held pending deportation. Because the Tunisian authorities missed the deadline for submitting extradition documents, the man was released from German custody in November 2016. He was then under constant surveillance until this arrest.

Along with the raid in Frankfurt, police carried out dawn raids in other cities of the southwestern German state of Hesse, including Offenbach, Darmstadt, and the state capital, Wiesbaden. The raids were conducted on apartments, commercial properties, and mosques. “With this operation, we are sending a clear message to radical Islamists in Hessen: We have them firmly within our sights,” said Hessen interior minister Peter Beuth.