MAIL ONLINE: German intelligence is warning of a new breed of terrorist - whole family groups travelling to training camps on the Afghan-Pakistan border where they learn how to use explosives and raise funds.
Parents travelling with children have in the past raised less suspicion than single men or women travelling to and from Germany.
Now officials have the names of 100 suspects they believe may be radicalised and ready to strike.
Germany is braced for a terror attack after repeated threats because of its involvement in Afghanistan. >>> Allan Hall | Easter Monday, April 05, 2010
SPIEGEL ONLINE INTERNATIONAL: A wave of Germans traveling to training camps for militant jihadists has alarmed security officials back in Europe. The recruits are quickly becoming radicalized and, in some cases, entire families are departing to hotbeds for terrorism. It is even believed that colonies catering to German Islamists have taken shape in the border area between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
It was a Sunday in September when they lost their son Jan*. He gave his parents a particularly tight hug, his father recalls, a long and intense embrace. The father says that he could sense that this was no normal goodbye, and that it was about more than the supposed vacation trip to celebrate the couple's first wedding anniversary -- which was the story that Jan, 24, and his wife Alexandra* had cooked up for him.
It was the day of the German parliamentary elections in 2009, and the autumn sun was shining in Berlin, but Jan and Alexandra weren't interested in who would govern the country. They were going to leave Germany. They had rejected this society and this state. Jan and Alexandra packed their things into a rental car, picked up another couple, and the four friends headed off into exile. One of their traveling companions was 17 years old and six months pregnant -- her husband had just turned 20. Their child would not be born in Germany.
The two married couples headed to Budapest, where they boarded a plane for Istanbul. Jan placed one last call to his parents from a hotel.
Since then there have been only sporadic e-mails. These have been loving messages to his father and mother. But he also writes things that frighten his parents. He is living among brothers and doesn't need much money, Jan writes. No, they can't visit him -- it would be too dangerous, he says. And no, he can no longer imagine returning to Berlin, to a life among the kuffar, the infidels.
Then, in December, he wrote that he didn't know if he would live to see the next summer. Since then his parents have been looking in their mailbox every morning -- and every morning it's the same: nothing. They can hardly bear the uncertainty. Extremist Expats >>> Yassin Musharbash, Marcel Rosenbach and Holger Stark | Easter Monday, April 05, 2010
* Editor's note: Name has been changed by the editors.
Translated from the German by Paul Cohen
