Chancellor Angela Merkel has praised a Syrian man who overpowered a would-be Islamic State bomber, bound him up with electric cable and handed him over to police.
German police had placed Dschaber al-Bakr under observation after indications he was planning to build an explosive belt and detonate it at a Berlin airport. When they raided his apartment on Saturday in the eastern German city of Chemnitz, they discovered 1.5kg of explosive and a half-finished belt – but the 22-year-old had given them the slip and vanished.
Shortly afterwards they saw a man matching his description on the street and fired a warning shot, but he escaped. Hours later a man appeared in nearby Leipzig, seeking somewhere to stay in an online forum for refugees. Two men agreed to take him in and met at the city's central train station. At a friend's house they gave him rice and lamb to eat.
"Then we went to another pal where the terrorist spent the night," said a man identified only as Mohamed A. to the Bild tabloid. Mohamed was a 36-year-old man who fled Syria and Islamic State.
The next day he noticed al-Bakr's photo in a police warning on Facebook and, after discussing it with friends, Mohamed held him down and bound him with electric cable. "If we let him go he offered us €1,000 and $200 that he had in a rucksack, along with a knife," said Mohamed, who refused the offer. "We couldn't allow that he does anything to Germans."
While a friend guarded the prisoner, Mohamed went to the police and showed them a photo. They arrested him shortly before 1am on Monday morning.
News of the arrest brought relief but a mixed reaction among German politicians. Through a spokeswoman, Dr Merkel said: “Our thanks and recognition goes to the man from Syria who informed police of the suspect’s location and made a decisive contribution to the arrest.”
Other German politicians are more critical, saying Germany has once again avoided a major terrorist attack by another stroke of luck. Federal interior minister Thomas de Maizière conceded that the preparations of the Chemnitz bomber had parallels to attacks in Brussels and Paris.
"The investigations show that acts such as that we have seen in France and Belgium cannot be ruled out in Germany," he said.
Bavarian interior minister Joachim Herrmann said the young man crossed the German border into Bavaria in February 2015. Mr Herrmann said investigators were now trying to establish whether the man had been radicalised before or after he arrived in Germany.
Dr Merkel and her Christian Democratic (CDU/CSU) alliance have said the weekend scare makes the case for criminal police to have systematic access to the asylum application database.
“We have to do everything humanly possible – if need be change laws – to guarantee people’s security,” said Dr Merkel. But her Social Democrat coalition allies have warned of generating blanket suspicion towards all would-be refugees in Germany.
