Germany shuts mall over attack threat

German police sealed off and closed a shopping mall in the heart of the western city of Essen yesterday after the security services warned of a possible terrorist attack.
Germany is on high alert following deadly militant Islamist attacks in France and Belgium and after a failed asylum-seeker from Tunisia drove a truck into a Berlin Christmas market in December, killing 12 people.
“Yesterday, we received very serious indications from security sources that a possible attack was planned here for today and would be carried out,” a spokesman for Essen police told Reuters Television. “That is why we were forced to take these measures.”
“The shopping centre will be closed all Saturday due to security concerns. The police have concrete information regarding a possible attack,” local police said in a statement published on social media.
Security services quoted by the Bild newspaper described the threat as a potential multiple suicide bombing.
“Many agents are deployed onsite. This is a major operation,” a spokesman told AFP, indicating the lockdown that included the Limbecker Platz shopping centre in downtown Essen, nearby parking garages and an underground rail station all locked down in security cordon.
Armed police and vans surrounded the shopping centre, one of the biggest in Germany with more than 200 retail outlets, but roads nearby were open to traffic.
In the afternoon, police said they had searched an apartment in the nearby town of Oberhausen and the owner was being questioned.
Police later said they had detained another man in an Internet cafe in the same town for questioning.
The police gave no further details apart from saying that the investigations in Oberhausen were linked to the Essen operation.
Essen, in the industrial Ruhr region, has nearly 600,000 inhabitants.
Last July, a German-Iranian man who police say was obsessed with mass murderers, including a Norwegian right-wing fanatic, shot dead nine people at a Munich shopping mall before turning the gun on himself.
Domestic security officials estimate there are some 10,000 radical Islamists in Germany, with roughly 1,600 among them suspected of being capable of violence.
The Islamic State has claimed responsibility for attacks in Germany in the past year, including the murder of a teen in Hamburg, a suicide bombing in Ansbach and an axe rampage on a train in Wuerzberg that injured five.