Prosecutors announced on Tuesday that they had charged three men arrested last year on suspicion of planning what officials said was a major terrorist plot, with the potential to kill hundreds.
The German federal prosecutor’s office charged the men with membership in foreign and domestic terrorist organizations, and with plotting bombing attacks aimed at locations in Germany frequented by Americans.
A security official said that, based on surveillance tapes, the suspects discussed attacking a dance club in Giessen, modeling their assault on the one in 2002 that killed 202 people in Bali, Indonesia.
The arrests last year shocked Germany, in part because two of the suspects were German converts to Islam. Officials said the men had visited terrorist training camps in the Waziristan region of Pakistan. Security specialists say the plot was intended to influence German public opinion, in an attempt to force a withdrawal of the country’s troops from the NATO mission in Afghanistan.
The charges are the first step in legal proceedings that will almost certainly stretch into next year if the case goes to trial as planned.
The police arrested the defendants, Fritz Gelowicz, Adem Yilmaz and Daniel Martin Schneider last year after keeping them under surveillance for several months.
Schneider also is charged with attempted murder. He is accused of taking the pistol of a policeman during the arrest and trying to kill him, the German police said.
“We have charged them today,” said Frank Wallenta, spokesman for the federal prosecutor in Karlsruhe, but he said he could not give more details because the accused and their lawyers had not received the charges.
The police seized detonators and significant quantities of chemicals, most notably 680kg of hydrogen peroxide, some of which the authorities were able to replace with weaker concentrations that could not be used to make bombs while the suspects were under observation.
Officials said that if the suspects had not been stopped, they could have produced a bomb with a force equal to 500kg of TNT, more powerful than the bombs that killed 191 people in Madrid in 2004 and 52 commuters in London in 2005, prosecutors said when the three were arrested.
“They were trying to do a second Bali,” said the German security official familiar with the case, who would talk only under the condition of anonymity because of prohibitions against commenting on pending legal proceedings.
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