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By Shannon McDonagh
News Reporter
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A 27-year-old Syrian man has been arrested in Munich for allegedly planning an attack on German soldiers during their lunch break, authorities announced Friday.
The suspect, believed to be a radical Islamist, aimed to kill as many soldiers as possible in a targeted assault in Upper Franconia, near Nuremberg.
Munich's public prosecutor's office said the man had acquired two machetes, each approximately 16 inches long, earlier this month.
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His plan was to launch the attack during a soldier's lunch break in a public space.
Public officials say the goal was to murder soldiers in broad daylight and to breed insecurity among the country's wider population.
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The arrest is the latest in a series of attacks and foiled plots involving radicalized individuals in Germany, a country that has faced numerous challenges from homegrown and foreign-linked terrorism over the past decade.
Details of the suspect's circumstances are still emerging—he was taken into custody on Thursday and brought before a judge the next day.
His name has not been released, in accordance with German privacy laws.
This plot comes on the heels of an August 23 attack in Solingen, where a man also linked to Islamist extremism killed three people and wounded eight others in a stabbing rampage at a festival.
A 26-year-old Syrian asylum-seeker who had evaded deportation from Germany to Bulgaria, was arrested shortly after the attack.
The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for what happened, though no evidence has been provided to verify the connection.
Following this, Chancellor Olaf Scholz promised mass deportations to pacify voters amid the rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), who made significant gains in recent local elections.
"We will have to do everything so that those who aren't allowed to stay in Germany are sent back and deported," he said, adding that "we have massively expanded the possibilities to carry out such deportations."
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In response to pressure from the far-right, the German interior ministry has taken the dramatic step of reintroducing temporary border controls across all of its nine neighboring countries.
This move, announced earlier this week, will last six months and is intended to prevent the uncontrolled movement of people across the European Union's internal borders, a hallmark of the Schengen Agreement.
The Schengen Agreement allows for border-free travel between 27 European countries.
Citizens and visitors can travel, live, and work in any Schengen country without needing visas or border checks, facilitating mobility for millions of people each year.
Controls in place at the Austrian border since 2015 and the Polish, Czech, and Swiss borders since last year will now apply to Belgium, Denmark, France, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands.
Internal border restrictions can only be applied "as a last resort measure, in exceptional situations," according to Schengen's website.
Some neighboring countries have expressed their dismay at the move, which German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser says will deter "immediate threats of Islamist terrorism and serious crime."
Earlier this week, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk denounced it as "unacceptable."
Critics have also accused Scholz and his fellow policymakers of pandering to a vocal minority.
"The intention of the government seems to be to show symbolically to Germans and to potential migrants that the latter are no longer wanted here," said Marcus Engler of the German Centre for Integration and Migration Research in a statement.
This article includes reporting from The Associated Press
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