Berlin summons Iran envoy after court finds ties to 2022 synagogue arson plot
Judge said attack was planned with help of Iranian state agencies; foreign ministry says it ‘will not tolerate foreign-controlled violence in Germany,’ will consider next steps
The German foreign ministry said Tuesday it had summoned Iran’s charge d’affaires after a court found that an attempted arson attack on a synagogue last year was planned with the help of Iranian state agencies.
“We will not tolerate any foreign-controlled violence in Germany,” the ministry wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
The higher regional court in Duesseldorf had earlier sentenced a German-Iranian national to two years and nine months in prison over a plot to attack a synagogue in Germany in November 2022.
The 36-year-old, identified only as Babak J., had planned to target a synagogue in the western city of Bochum but ended up throwing an incendiary device at an adjacent school building. No one was injured.
In handing down the verdict, the Duesseldorf court on Tuesday said the attack had been planned with the help of “Iranian state agencies.”
“The fact that Jewish life should be attacked here is intolerable,” the foreign ministry said.
It added that it would carefully study the judgment to determine the “consequences and next steps, including at [the] EU level.”
Germany has grown increasingly alarmed in recent years about rising anti-Jewish sentiment eight decades after the end of the Holocaust.
The Israel-Hamas war has further enflamed tensions with German authorities registering a number of antisemitic incidents in recent weeks, including the targeting of a Berlin synagogue with Molotov cocktails in October.
Several thousand people demonstrated against antisemitism in Berlin earlier this month.
Police estimated that around 3,200 people gathered in the rain in the German capital, while organizers put the figure at 10,000, German news agency dpa reported. Participants in the protest, titled “Never again is now,” marched to the Brandenburg Gate.
A group tracking antisemitism in Germany said in late November that it had documented a drastic increase in antisemitic incidents in the month after Hamas’s October 7 deadly terror onslaught in southern Israel — a total of 994, an increase of 320 percent compared with the same period a year earlier.
Germany’s main Jewish leader, Josef Schuster, said that “antisemitism is common practice in Germany in the middle of society,” and called for solidarity with Israel and with Jewish life in Germany.
Germany’s Labor Minister Hubertus Heil said that many decent people are too quiet on the issue. “We don’t need a decent, silent majority — we need a clear and loud majority that stands up now, and not later,” he said.
