Germany charges four over Hamas weapons depots in Europe

The men “held important positions within the association with direct ties to leaders of the military wing” of Hamas, prosecutors said.

One of the two suspects born in Lebanon, named by prosecutors only as Ibrahim El-R., was said to have set up a weapons storage site for Hamas in Bulgaria.

Established in early 2019, the Bulgarian depot contained weapons, including a Kalashnikov assault rifle and ammunition, prosecutors said.

In mid-2019, Ibrahim El-R. had “cleared out” another weapons cache in Denmark and was said by prosecutors to have brought a pistol from there to Germany.

Between June and December 2023, all four suspects were said to have set off from Berlin in search of another Hamas weapons store in Poland but failed to locate it, according to investigators.

Prosecutors said Hamas had long ago “set up underground weapons depots in various European countries in order to keep them ready for possible attacks against Jewish institutions in Europe”.

The storage sites were maintained by foreign operatives in possession or European residence permits, ready to be “deployed at short notice”, prosecutors said.

Hamas had identified “Israeli embassy in Berlin, the US Air Base in Ramstein or the area around Tempelhof Airport in Berlin as possible targets”, they said.

The four suspects were arrested in December last year. Dutch national Nazih R. was detained in Rotterdam by local police, while the other three were arrested in Berlin.

Germany issued a ban on Hamas activities and organisations linked to the group in the wake of the militants’ attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, which triggered the war in Gaza.

The Hamas attack resulted in the deaths of 1,206 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.

Israel’s retaliatory campaign in Gaza has killed at least 44,235 people, most of them civilians, according to data from the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry, which the United Nations considers reliable.

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© Agence France-Presse