Germany Charges 3 Jailed in ’07 in Bomb Plot

FRANKFURT — German prosecutors announced Tuesday that they had charged the three men arrested last year on suspicion of planning what officials said was a major terrorist plot, with the potential to kill hundreds.

The German federal prosecutor’s office charged the men with membership in foreign and domestic terrorist organizations, and with plotting bombing attacks aimed at locations in Germany frequented by Americans.

A security official said that, based on surveillance tapes, the suspects discussed attacking a dance club in Giessen, modeling their assault on the one in October 2002 that killed 202 people in Bali, Indonesia, including many Australian tourists.

The arrests last year shocked Germany, in part because two of the suspects were German converts to Islam. Officials said the men had visited terrorist training camps in the Waziristan region of Pakistan. Security specialists here say the plot was intended to influence German public opinion, in an attempt to force a withdrawal of the country’s troops from the NATO mission in Afghanistan.

The charges are another step in legal proceedings that will almost certainly stretch into next year if the case goes to trial.

The police arrested the defendants, Fritz Gelowicz, Adem Yilmaz and Daniel Martin Schneider, almost a year ago, on Sept. 5, 2007, after keeping them under surveillance for several months.

Mr. Schneider also is charged with attempted murder. He is accused of taking the pistol of a policeman during the arrest and trying to kill him, the German police said.

“We have charged them today,” said Frank Wallenta, spokesman for the federal prosecutor in Karlsruhe, but he said he could not give more detailed information because the accused and their lawyers had not received the charges.

The police seized military-style detonators and significant quantities of chemicals, most notably 1,500 pounds of hydrogen peroxide, some of which the authorities were able to replace with weaker concentrations that could not be used to make bombs while the suspects were under observation. Officials said that if the suspects had not been stopped, they could have produced a bomb with a force equal to 1,100 pounds of TNT, more powerful than the bombs that killed 191 people in Madrid in 2004 and 52 commuters in London in 2005, prosecutors said when the three were arrested. “They were trying to do a second Bali,” said the German security official familiar with the case, who would talk only under the condition of anonymity because of prohibitions against commenting on pending legal proceedings.

The official described, based on surveillance tapes, how the suspects spoke about attacking the club.

According to the official, they planned first to detonate a small bomb to send people into panic and drive them out onto the street. Once the police and emergency personnel had arrived, the official said, they would set off a much larger explosion, intended to cause the greatest possible number of casualties.

Mr. Gelowicz is believed to have been the leader of the cell and to have been in direct contact with the leadership of the Islamic Jihad Union, a terrorist group with origins in Uzbekistan, which runs training camps in Waziristan and has ties to Al Qaeda and the Taliban, the official said.

Days before their arrests, the men talked about different targets, including the airport in Frankfurt and American military installations like the Ramstein Air Base.