Pro-Hamas demonstrators marching in Munich, Germany. Photo: Reuters/Alexander Pohl

The head of Germany’s police service on Wednesday said there was little doubt that four men detained on Dec. 14 were planning terrorist attacks on Jewish targets at the behest of Hamas.

“There is an urgent suspicion that the accused allegedly planned an attack against Jewish institutions in Europe and wanted to collect weapons that they hid in a depot,” Holger Münch — the president of the German Federal Criminal Office (BKA) —  stated in an interview with the Swiss news outlet NZZ.

Asked whether the alleged terrorists had set up their weapons dump at a site in Poland, Münch said only that it was “somewhere in Europe” and that further details would emerge from intelligence reports.

Three of the suspects were arrested in Berlin, according to a statement from the office of Germany’s Federal Prosecutor General. A fourth man was arrested in the Dutch city of Rotterdam and was extradited to Karlsruhe in Germany where the accused are awaiting trial.

Additionally, Danish police arrested three individuals on the same day in Copenhagen charged with planning terrorist attacks on Jewish targets, though it is not clear if the operations were connected. “It is a great strength that there is very intensive international cooperation in the fight against Islamist terrorism,” Münch said. “Our partners give us tips, we give them tips.”

Münch emphasized that the threat posed by Islamist terrorism was “never gone.”

“We still have a large number of radicalized people who continue to try to find themselves in the various forums and [chat] groups. The current Middle East conflict acts as an amplifier because it is emotionally charged,” he said, referring to the ongoing Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. “At the moment, the danger therefore arises in particular from radicalized individual perpetrators or small groups who are planning comparatively easy to carry out attacks, for example with knives or vehicles, objects that are readily available.”

Münch also confessed that he was surprised by the “order of magnitude” of the antisemitic and Islamist propaganda circulating in Germany since the Oct. 7. Hamas pogrom in southern Israel.

“We have registered more than 4,700 crimes related to the terrorist attacks on Israel since Oct. 7,” he said. “These are quite often antisemitic crimes that are recorded as property damage or propaganda and incitement offenses by the police. Much of this crime is committed by people to whom we attribute to politically motivated crime — foreign ideology or religious ideology.”

Asked about the high proportion of Muslim immigrants detained for antisemitic agitation, Münch said that “we have to be even clearer about what our expectations of all people living here in Germany are.”

He continued: “It must be clear that certain values based on our history are inviolable. This includes Israel’s right to exist as well as the security of Jews in Germany.”