Spying proposal targets German Muslims

BERLIN — After thwarting what might have become a "massive" attack on American installations, German authorities will review ways to fight homegrown terrorists, including a proposal to allow Internet spying on all German converts to Islam.

The search for seven other suspected members of a German cell of the Pakistan-based Islamic Jihad Union continued into Thursday night, with investigators saying only that they knew whom they were seeking.

Anti-terror police arrested three men in a village in central Germany on Tuesday, outside a vacation cabin where they were suspected of building a bomb. Germans were shocked to learn that two of the alleged bombers were native-born and had common German names, Fritz and Daniel. All three were unemployed and living on German government benefits, but other details are sketchy.

This was "something new, and not in a good way," said Col. Christopher Langdon of London's International Institute for Strategic Studies. They "came from the white German population. They were very traditional German residents who converted and radicalized. These bombers were not Pakistani or Moroccan. That is raising eyebrows."

Anti-terror forces had been concerned primarily with first or second generation Muslim immigrants — not white Europeans.

Guenther Beckstein, the interior minister in the German state of Bavaria, has called for a new law authorizing online surveillance of Islamic converts.

"Germans converting to Islam should be watched because they tend to show particular fanaticism in order to prove worthy of their new religion," he said Thursday.