German plotters had orders to strike by mid-September: report

BERLIN: Three suspected Islamists arrested in Germany for plotting to bomb US targets had received orders from a contact in Pakistan to strike by mid-September, Der Spiegel magazine reported on Sunday.

The weekly said the suspected plot leader, a German convert to Islam called Fritz Gelowicz, had received a phone call from a member of the Islamic Jihad Union, a radical group linked to Al-Qaeda, in northern Pakistan at the end of August.

The man, whom Gelowicz reportedly called "chief", gave the three-man cell in Germany a two-week deadline to carry out an attack, the magazine said.

The call, as well as a slip of the tongue by a small-town policeman, prompted German security forces who had been watching the three men for months, to storm their hideaway in southwestern Germany and arrest them on Tuesday.

They were seized in Medebach-Oberschledorn in the Sauerland region at a rented holiday home where they had stockpiled 12 barrels of chemicals to use in "massive" car bomb attacks against US targets in Germany, federal prosecutors said.

The men - Gelowicz, another German convert to Islam and a Turk - had been under surveillance since January.

Der Spiegel said that German Chancellor Angela Merkel and US President George Bush had discussed the case, code-named "Operation Alberich", on the sidelines of the G8 summit in Germany in June.

Washington cooperated closely with the investigation.