DPA
Berlin


Sven Lau, 35, a former German fireman who converted to Islam and became a radical preacher, was arrested yesterday on suspicion of supporting a terrorist group.
Police who executed a federal arrest warrant say evidence has come to light that in 2013 he actively supported Jamwa, an organisation in Syria that has allied itself with the Islamic State terrorist group.
German authorities have regularly sought to prosecute Lau, who advocates Salafism, a puritan doctrine that claims to recreate the Islam of 1,400 years ago, but had failed so far to make charges stick.
The federal prosecutor’s office in Karlsruhe said he was detained in Moenchengladbach where he has been living. It said four instances of support to Jamwa would be cited.
Support for a foreign terrorist group is a crime in Germany.
It would be alleged that Lau was the liaison in the greater Dusseldorf area for Salafists eager to travel to Syria and nearby to fight. Jamwa split in late 2013, and the faction Lau supported allied with Islamic State, they said.
Other acts included supplying night-vision devices to those going to Syria.
Lau’s lawyer, Mutlu Gunal, could not immediately be contacted for comment.
Lau, who was a senior firefighter before discovering religion, has been gifted at attracting publicity, such as by handing out free translations of the Koran on the streets.
He angered Germany last year by organising a group called the Shariah Police that lingered outside bars and gambling shops in the western city of Wuppertal, warning young Muslim men not to enter.
The operation, which yielded him and his supporters huge attention on radio and TV and from politicians across the political spectrum, vanished after a warning from German police.
Facebook and Google agreed yesterday to abide by German laws on hate speech on their social networks in Germany, responding to complaints by the government that they are too slow to take down xenophobic abuse posted online.
At a meeting with justice minister Heiko Maas, the mainly US-based portals agreed that they would not merely apply their own terms of service, but also make it easier for users to cite German law to challenge the legality of remarks.
As the European migration crisis unfolds, users say far-right extremism is becoming increasingly common in German-language contributions to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Maas had asked the firms for an action plan to deal with the problem.
This will include “user friendly mechanisms” to report hate speech and bans on the accounts of offenders.
Germany has stricter controls on sedition than many other nations and allows no leeway on glorification of the Nazis, use of their swastika symbol or Holocaust denial.
German public prosecutors have already brought people to trial for anti-migrant remarks on Facebook, even by those using pseudonyms, but Berlin has complained that some online companies place their terms of service above German law.
“What’s important is that German law will be applied, and to a single standard, not just the terms of service as was the case in certain instances before,” said Maas in Berlin.
Richard Allen of Facebook Europe said the aim would now be to take down content within 24 hours of it being flagged, but this might not be always possible at times of heavy posting, such as just after last month’s terrorist attacks in Paris.
Google Germany’s chief legal officer Arnd Haller said Google had always reviewed complaints in Germany by the standards of both its terms of service and German law.
Maas set up a working party with Google, Twitter and Facebook in September to discuss how to stop hate speech.
A Munich court stepped up its attempts to lift the lid on a neo-Nazi terrorist cell accused of carrying out a series of racially inspired murders, releasing a barrage of questions for the group’s alleged sole survivor.
Beate Zschaepe, who is considered to be the last remaining member of the National Socialist Underground (NSU), has denied being a member of the group or any direct involvement in the 10 murders it carried out.
Responding to Zschaepe’s denials, read to the court as 53-page testimony by her lawyer last week, Judge Manfred Goetzl sought to examine gaps in her statement and elaborate on key points in her evidence.
Goetzl asked Zschaepe when she was told about the murders that were carried out by the two other NSU members, Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Boehnhardt, between 2000 and 2007.
Mundlos and Boehnhardt died in an apparent murder-suicide in November 2011 after a robbery.
Zschaepe, 40, faces charges of being a member of a terrorist organization and an accomplice in 15 robberies and in the murders, which included the killing of a German policewoman.
In addition the court wanted to know what was the nature of the relationship between Zschaepe, Mundlos and Boehnhardt, and the names those who helped the NSU.
It also wanted her to name the Nazis songs she said they sang together when they were growing up in the eastern German town of Jena.
Zschaepe, remained silent throughout the two-and-half year trial until her testimony last week, will only answer the court’s questions in a written form.
In her statement, Zschaepe said that she had heard on the radio of the discovery of two bodies in a burn-out camper van and that she knew that it was Mundlos and Boehnhardt.
She then torched the apartment the three had shared in the eastern German city of Zwickau before travelling across the country. After four days she gave herself up to police.
Now the court wants to know where she was during those four days and the name of the radio station she heard the news of Mundlos and Boernhardt’s deaths.
Two men accused of planning a bomb attack on the Israeli embassy in Berlin “just wanted to have a laugh”, according to one of the defendants, who spoke on the first day of the trial yesterday.
The two suspects, both of Palestinian descent, are charged with building a bomb at a flat in Berlin. According to the prosecution, one of them is thought to have become radicalised and talked the other into planning an attack on the Israeli embassy.
But on appearing in court for the first time, one of the 21-year-old defendants said: “We just wanted to have a laugh and to experience something crazy.”
He claimed that no attack was planned and that the two intended on setting the device off in the woods.
Both men, who are being tried by the regional youth court in the German capital, have spent the past five months in custody.