Has a serious attack by Islamist-motivated terrorists been foiled in Germany?
On Sunday it was initially unclear whether two Iranian citizens arrested in Castrop-Rauxel wanted to build a bomb enriched with toxins in order to kill as many people as possible.
In any case, no biological-chemical warfare agents such as ricin and cyanide were found in the apartment of one of the suspects.
The fact that the North Rhine-Westphalian Minister of the Interior, Herbert Reul, nevertheless speaks of a "serious reference" to concrete attack plans and that a SEK unit in protective suits was deployed does not indicate a blind alarm or a PR campaign by overzealous public prosecutors in Düsseldorf.
Depending on the FBI and CIA
The fact that the secret service of a "friendly state" apparently gave the German security authorities the decisive indication of an impending Islamist attack also speaks for an acute threat scenario.
The averted attack planned four years ago by a Tunisian and his German wife in Cologne-Chorweiler shows how real the danger of a poison bomb attack, for example with ricin, is.
Here, too, the German anti-terror investigators only found the perpetrators on a tip from a foreign intelligence service.
The discovery of explosives by a Syrian Islamist in Chemnitz in 2016 was also thanks to a tip from America.
With regard to the current case, terrorism experts also point out that it was always American authorities that gave their German colleagues decisive information about impending or planned Islamist attacks.
The rightly enforced focus of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution and the police on repelling right-wing extremist violence must not lead to underestimating the danger of Islamist attacks that still exists.
Dependence on the watchful eyes of the FBI or CIA is negligent.