Europe on edge: Paris police nab terror suspects, Germans arrest extremists

Police arrested a dozen people suspected of providing “logistical support” to the Islamist militant gunmen in last week’s Paris killings, authorities said Friday as U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry arrived for talks and “shared a big hug with Paris.” Earlier today in Berlin, hundreds of police raided 11 residences at dawn, taking two Turkish men into custody on suspicion they were recruiting fighters and procuring funding for Islamic State militants in Syria. The Paris and German raids came a day after Belgium police raided a terror cell in the eastern town of Verviers near the German border. Belgium officers, who killed two suspects in a gun battle after the suspects opened fire on police, say they averted “imminent” large-scale attacks on police targets with the raids. Meantime, the head of the European Union police agency said that nations need to cooperate more closely to prevent further attacks.

The scale of the problem, the diffuse nature of the network, the scale of the people involved makes this extremely difficult for even very well-functioning counterterrorist agencies such as we have in France to stop every attack.

Europol chief Rob Wainwright

Europe has been on alert since the Islamist attacks on the French Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine, which printed cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, and a Jewish supermarket in Paris last week in which 17 people were killed. While there were no direct links between the arrests across the three neighboring countries, they come on the heels of calls for greater anti-terror cooperation across the European Union.