Tunisian held in Germany linked to 2015 museum attack: Prosecutors

A Tunisian who took part in militant attacks in Tunisia has been arrested by German police on suspicion of planning an attack in Germany.

The 36-year-old Tunisian was held in a major search operation involving 1,100 police officers. Police searched 54 homes, business premises and mosques in Frankfurt, and other towns in the western state of Hesse in the early hours of Wednesday, German authorities said.

The suspect, who has not been named, is accused of involvement in the deadly 2015 attack on the Bardo Museum in Tunis, which killed 20 people, and another Islamic State group attack that killed dozens in Tunisia last March, prosecutors said. 

In Germany, he is suspected of recruiting for the Islamic State militant group since August 2015 and building up a network of supporters with the aim of carrying out an attack in Germany, Frankfurt's prosecutor general said in a statement.

Police carried out the raids in Frankfurt am Main, Offenbach am Main, Darmstadt, Limburg and Wiesbaden as well as in some other districts. Authorities are investigating 16 suspects aged between 16 and 46, including the arrested man.

Tunisian authorities issued an arrest warrant for the suspect last year on suspicion of "participating in planning and carrying out" the attack, as well as a deadly militant assault on the Tunisian border town of Ben Guerdane last March, the prosecutor's office in the western state of Hesse said in a statement. 

Many Germans feel unnerved after Anis Amri, a failed asylum seeker from Tunisia, killed 12 people when he attacked a Berlin Christmas market in December - the worst in a spate of attacks on civilians in Germany over the past year.

However, the latest attack plans were at an early stage and there was no concrete target yet, the prosecutor general said.

Peter Beuth, interior minister of the state of Hesse, said there had not been any immediate danger: "It was not about preventing an imminent attack - rather security forces in Hesse intervened early to protect citizens from the threat of harm."

Beuth added that the officers involved in the raids had managed to "destroy an extensive Salafist network". Salafism is an ultra-conservative branch of Islam.

Prosecutors in Frankfurt are due to hold a news conference at 10.00 local time.

German police also arrested three men in Berlin on Tuesday on suspicion of having close links to Islamic State militants and planning to travel to the Middle East for combat training.