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Germany arrests Algerian suspected of planning attack

German police raids Thursday, including at a refugee shelter in Attendorn, sought suspected terrorists.Bernd Thissen/AFP/Getty Images

BERLIN — An Algerian man suspected of training with Islamic State terrorists in Syria and of planning an attack in Germany was taken into custody at a refugee shelter in North Rhine-Westphalia early Thursday, as hundreds of police officers carried out raids in three German states, the police said.

Police detained the man, who is 35 years old and was not identified in keeping with German law, along with an Algerian woman whose arrest had been sought on different charges, authorities said.

The Algerian man entered Germany, which took in more than 1 million migrants last year and has been on high alert since the Paris terrorist attacks in November that killed 130 people, at the Bavarian border last fall, the news service DPA reported, citing security sources.

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A second Algerian man was also detained in the coordinated raids, which began at 6 a.m. in Berlin, Hanover, and Attendorn, a town of about 25,000 around an hour’s drive northeast of Cologne, said a Berlin police spokesman, Stefan Redlich. Police found two other Algerian men they were seeking — a 31-year-old in Berlin and a 26-year-old in Hanover — but did not take them formally into custody, authorities said.

All four men are suspected of links to the Islamic State and are believed to have been “planning a violent act intended to seriously damage the state,” Redlich said.

The raids involved 450 police officers, Redlich said. In Berlin they were centered on four apartments and two businesses; in Attendorn and Hanover the investigation focused on refugee shelters.

Police in North Rhine-Westphalia disclosed last month that a man who had most recently lived at a refugee shelter in the town of Recklinghausen was the lone assailant who was shot and killed in January as he approached a Paris police station on the anniversary of the January 2015 assault on the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo.

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Concerns about the terrorism threat intensified in Germany after the deadly assaults in Paris in November. Four days after those attacks, a soccer match between Germany and the Netherlands in Hanover, which was to be attended by Chancellor Angela Merkel and senior ministers, was abruptly canceled in response to a warning from unspecified foreign intelligence agencies.