Germany charges four for setting up Hamas weapons depots across Europe
Prosecution says suspects had ties to senior Hamas leaders and established several arms caches that would be available for use in terror attacks against Israeli and Jewish sites
BERLIN, Germany — German federal prosecutors said Monday they had charged four suspected members of Hamas, allegedly tasked with sourcing and storing weapons for the Palestinian terror group in Europe.
Two men born in Lebanon, an Egyptian citizen and a Dutch man were suspected of “membership in a foreign terrorist organization,” the federal prosecutor’s office said in a statement.
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 the “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 organizations linked to the group in the wake of the terror group’s assault on Israel on October 7, 2023, in which some 1,200 people were killed and another 251 taken hostage.
The massacre triggered the war in Gaza.
