Germany has arrested a 23-year-old Syrian man accused of spreading propaganda for the Islamic State jihadist group, prosecutors said today.
Mohammed G, who arrived amid a mass refugee influx to Germany in September 2015, was detained yesterday in the western region of Ostwestfalen and remanded in custody by a judge today.
He allegedly worked as a link between the IS "news agency" Amaq and potential militants - including a 30-year-old Syrian refugee living in Sweden.
That man, a Sunni Muslim, had been accused by prosecutors of throwing a Molotov cocktail at a Shiite Muslim cultural centre in the southern city of Malmo last October 11, in an attack captured by a surveillance camera.
However, a Swedish court on April 21 cleared the man of terrorism charges as the fire did not seriously harm the Swedish state, and also of arson because of a lack of fingerprints or eye-witnesses.
German prosecutors in their statement said, however, that Mohammed G had been in social media contact since at least September 2016 with the Syrian man living in Sweden.
They said that one day after the Malmo attack, G had demanded "a personal claim of responsibility" from his contact person because Amaq required this before calling it an IS attack.
"Subsequently the IS claimed responsibility for the attack" in its al-Naba weekly newspaper, said the German prosecution service.
(This article has not been edited by DNA's editorial team and is auto-generated from an agency feed.)
