Sean Gallup/Getty ImagesTravelers passed by a German policeman armed with a submachine gun at Hauptbahnhof railway station in Berlin on Thursday.
By STEFAN PAULY and MICHAEL SLACKMAN - NYTimes.com
Published: November 17, 201
BERLIN — Germany dispatched heavily armed police and bomb-sniffing dogs to its train stations, airports and key landmarks on Wednesday after the interior minister announced there was new evidence that Islamic terrorists planned to strike the nation within the coming weeks.
Sean Gallup/Getty Images
German police at the Hauptbahnhof railway station in Berlin on Thursday.
In a hastily called news conference in the capital, Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière issued one of his most explicit warnings to date.
“The security situation in Germany has become more serious,” Mr. de Maizière told the news conference. “We have concrete indications of a series of attacks planned for the end of November.” He said new information that created a “new situation” had emerged after a tip from Saudi Arabia led to the interception of two bombs shipped by air from Yemen. One had passed through a German airport.
“There’s reason to be worried, but no reason to panic,” said Mr. de Maizière. “We won’t be intimidated by international terror, neither in our way of life, nor our culture or freedom.”
The announcement and decision to show force on the streets represented a significant shift in approach. Mr. de Maizière has insisted for months that Germany faced only an abstract threat, even as intelligence reports concerning the possibility of a pending strike mounted. The raw intelligence reports have suggested that hit teams might be heading to Germany for a Mumbai-style attack or other terror strikes, a government intelligence official said.
But intelligence officials said they could not tell which reports were credible, even as they acknowledged concerns over a growing radical faction in Germany and as traffic between Germany and the Afghanistan-Pakistan region increased.
A high-ranking German intelligence official said that the decision to ramp up security and alert the public to the potential for a terrorist strike was likely a response to the stream of reports, rather than to a single new tip.
“In essence, the messages are nonspecific and the sources are difficult to reconstruct,” said the official, who insisted on anonymity because of the nature of his work. “It was a colorful variety of information and because of this, the impression developed that something is about to happen.”
A European intelligence official, who similarly spoke on condition of anonymity, said that “within the last six weeks there had been some Germans arrested in Pakistan” who said attackers were already in place in Germany, though they did not know where or when a strike was planned.
The German intelligence official said that the alert was also a likely result of the realization of the vulnerabilities of the cargo system, underscored not only by the Yemen bombs but also by a less-powerful package bomb sent from Greece that was found in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s mail a few days later.
The concerns over cargo are particularly troubling at the time of year when holiday gifts flow heavily through the system, and, the official said, tipped the state from defining the threat as “abstract,” to concrete.
A Pakistani official said recently that drone strikes in Pakistan in September and October were believed to have killed Europeans directly involved in various plots, possibly including targets in Germany and Britain. Speaking anonymously on intelligence matters, he said several such plotters were believed to be still at large.
Germany has defended its generally restrained response to threats, saying that warnings — like the one Washington issued for Europe weeks ago — do little to protect the public while putting terrorism in the public eye, which is in itself a sort of victory for terrorists.
“We would be making a big mistake as a society if we allowed our free and democratic way of life to be impaired in any way,” a government spokesman, Steffen Seibert, insisted in Berlin on Wednesday. “That would be giving the terrorists a cheap victory.”
At Friedrichstrasse station in Berlin, a busy intersection for national and regional and commuter trains, heavily armed police in dark uniforms were patrolling the platforms and entry and exit points to the station by the afternoon rush hour.
While the security staff of Deutsche Bahn, the German Federal railways, seemed relaxed about Mr. de Maizière’s new alert warning, smoking and chatting outside the station, there was an increased police presence in the streets close to the Parliament and lawmakers’ offices.
“I worry about these terror alerts,” said Sabine Krohl, a sales assistant. “It’s all very well shrugging them off by saying it will never happen here in Germany.”
“But you never just know,” she added, rushing to catch her commuter train.
