Raids in Germany, Britain in probe linked to Syria militants

BERLIN: Police searched homes and other properties in Britain and the German state of North-Rhine Westphalia on Wednesday for evidence on two suspects believed to have supported militant group Jabhat Al-Nusra (JAN), Germany’s chief federal prosecutor’s office said.
Federal prosecutors said that the raids were conducted in an effort to secure more evidence against the pair, whom they didn’t identify.
They were suspected of collecting donations for the group and had supplied ambulances, medical equipment and medication through groups called “Medicine with Heart” and “Medicine without Borders,” it said.
“The two suspects are believed to have supported the foreign terrorist group JAN for several years,” the prosecutor’s office said in a statement.
A spokesman for the prosecutor’s office said the searches were still going on but declined to give further details about the case or the suspects, including their gender or nationality.
No arrests had been made, the spokesman said. There was no mention of any preparations for a specific attack, he said.
London police had no immediate information on the searches, but said two search warrants had been issued last month at the request of the Munich prosecutor’s office.
A spokeswoman for public prosecutor in Munich confirmed the warrants had been issued on the office’s behalf as part of “proceedings against terrorism.” She gave no further details.
Germany’s migration agency meanwhile hopes to clear a backlog of 435,000 asylum cases within months, the organization’s new director said in an interview with Germany’s Handelsblatt newspaper on Wednesday.
Jutta Cordt, who took over as head of the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) this month, told the newspaper her top priorities were to accelerate the processing of asylum applications, deepen integration, and step up deportations of those whose applications were denied.
“We carried over 435,000 cases into the new year and we want to have dealt with those this spring,” the paper quoted Cordt as saying.
She told the paper the agency had received 40 million euros ($42.57 million) in additional funding in 2017 to work on repatriation processing and wanted to start that process sooner.
“If there is virtually no prospect for a migrant to stay here, it makes sense to push for an early repatriation and to encourage that financially,” Cordt told the newspaper.
More than a million migrants from the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere have arrived in Germany since the beginning of 2015, prompting concerns about security and integration. Polls show that migration will be a key issue in September’s national election.
The issue of repatriation — and better identification of refugees — has taken on new urgency after a spate of militant attacks carried out by failed asylum seekers, including Anis Amri, the 24-year-old Tunisian man who rammed a truck into a Berlin Christmas market in December, killing 12 people.
Amri, who was shot dead in Italy, had lived in Germany under at least 14 different names, police have said.
Cordt told the Passauer Neue Presse newspaper in a separate interview that local authorities should be taking fingerprints from migrants to better track their identities and avoid multiple asylum applications.
Migrants are currently fingerprinted by police if they cross the German border without a valid passport, then again in a migrant intake center and for a third time when they file an asylum application.