Germany shut down two train stations in Munich about an hour before midnight local time on New Years Eve following a tip from the intelligence service of a friendly country that the Islamic State (IS) militant group was planning a suicide bomb attack.
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Hubertus Andrae, chief of the Munich police, said Friday that no one had been arrested and that the authorities were unsure if the people whose names they had been given were even in the country.
Bavaria’s interior minister Joachim Herrmann said Friday that authorities had details of some of the possible attackers and were investigating and verifying the information.
Police in Munich, Germany, have issued a terror alert and briefly evacuated two train stations on New Year’s Eve, after receiving intelligence of imminent suicide attacks planned by Daesh terrorists.
Andrae said investigators had in hand names of “half of the 5 to 7” suspects who were allegedly planning to blow themselves up at locations including Munich’s main rail hub and Pasing station in the western part of the city.
On Twitter and Facebook, Munich police asked people to avoid crowded places amid the ongoing New Year celebrations. The stations were both reopened at around 4am.
“Due to serious evidence, the Police in Munich is dealing with an active threat of a terror attack in the Munich area”, police said in German.
Both stations have been evacuated, they said, and train services were no longer running at the two stations.
“We received names. We can’t say if they are in Munich or in fact in Germany”, Andrae said.
Pasing neighbourhood station and Munich’s main station were evacuated because the alert, shortly before midnight.
He added: “It’s a bit weird, though, that we have a terrorist warning and people are firing off their fireworks”.
Across Europe, public celebrations went ahead as planned but under the watchful eye of thousands of police and security forces.
Belgian police were holding five people early Friday over an alleged New Year plot in Brussels and also arrested a 10th suspect over last month’s attacks in Paris.
As more people came, right-wing groups led by PEGIDA (which is a German acronym for “Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the Occident”) grew increasingly concerned that some of those arriving might be radicalized extremists using asylum as a loophole to crash into Europe and commit attacks.
More than 500 police officers were called in on New Year’s Eve just in case the threat eventuated into an attack.
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French President Francois Hollande said on Thursday the country was “not finished with terrorism” and used a New Year’s message to defend controversial plans to strip citizenship from those convicted of terrorism offences.
