The raids -- staged in the western cities of Moenchengladbach, Bremen and Braunschweig on Tuesday -- were aimed at Salafist groups Invitation to Paradise and the Islamic Culture Center of Bremen. Officials insisted that today's operation had been planned for some time and was not connected to a current terrorist threat to Germany.
The country has been on a heightened state of alert since last month, when authorities received a phone call from a man claiming to be a jihadist in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region, warning that terrorists were planning to attack the parliament in Berlin and a major tourist site.
Interior Ministry spokesman Stefan Paris told The Associated Press that the groups were targeted because they wanted "to create an Islamic theocracy" and were "working against the democratic order of Germany."
In a statement, the ministry cited one elder's goal of replacing Germany's legal system with Shariah law, which the government said is incompatible with parliamentary democracy. "It is necessary and important not to wait for a militant struggle in the form of jihad before intervening against unconstitutional groups," Paris said.
The raids are part of a long-term plan to shut down the two groups, which work closely together and share a similar Salafist ideology, an unnamed security official told the AP. The term "Salafist" is normally used to describe a follower of a highly puritanical form of Islamic fundamentalism. And although Salafism isn't inherently linked to extremism, the ideology has been connected to numerous terror plots.
"Not every Salafist turns into a terrorist, but we know that future terrorists have almost always visited Salafist workshops and schools," the intelligence service in the state of Lower Saxony -- where police searched Invitation to Paradise properties in the city of Braunschweig -- noted in a 2009 report, according to the AP.
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Sven Lau, a group leader for Invitation to Paradise in Moenchengladbach, told the AP that police seized computers, cell phones, books and receipts during their searches. "We're sad about this raid," he said. "We haven't done anything illegal."Tuesday's operation was a marked departure from the way German authorities normally handle radical Muslim organizations, noted The New York Times.
Intelligence-gathering operations are traditionally launched against individual extremists, rather than whole groups. And the raids were also conducted under the authority of post-World War II statutes intended to prevent the government or constitution from once again being overthrown by a Nazi-type movement. Until now, those laws were almost exclusively used against nationalist and far-right gangs.