Refugees Daily - Internal Global Press Review

BERLIN – German police on Thursday arrested a Syrian refugee suspected of links to Islamic State, a German prosecutor said, highlighting the potential security risks posed by Berlin's open-door refugee policy.

The state prosecutor in the city of Dortmund, Sonja Frodermann, said a man who had registered as Leeth Abdalhmeed and was born in 1984 had been detained at the refugee shelter in Unna-Massen on Thursday afternoon on suspicion of having links to the Sunni terror organization.

The arrest will heighten concerns among opponents of Chancellor Angela Merkel's open-door refugee policy that Islamist terrorists might be hiding among the roughly one million refugees who entered Germany this year, half of them coming from war-torn Syria.

At least two members of the terrorist cell that killed 130 people in a series of attacks in Paris on Nov. 13 are known to have entered Europe via Greece as refugees using fake Syrian passports. This week, Austrian police arrested two people at a Salzburg refugee shelter they suspect of being involved in the Paris attacks.

"We mustn't regard refugees with a general suspicion. But it's also true that concerns aren't unfounded that some potential threats might be among refugees," said Wolfgang Bosbach, lawmaker with Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union party. "We must specifically emphasize the issue of [refugees'] valid identification to avert threats."

For much of this year, overwhelmed German authorities stopped holding individual hearings for Syrians in a bid to speed up their asylum applications – a far cry from the exacting background checks conducted on Syrians who seek asylum in the U.S.

Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said this month that asylum requests for Syrians would again be handled on a case-by-case basis rather than being granted by default to people who claim to be Syrian.

The German government didn't immediately reply to requests for comments on the arrest on Thursday.

Ms. Frodermann, the prosecutor, said German authorities were alerted by a Syrian national who had seen an article on a website connecting Mr. Abdalhmeed with Islamic State.

A Syrian opposition activist and two people contacted via the website where the report on Mr. Abdalhmeed first appeared said they knew Mr. Abdalhmeed as Leith Abdul Hamid, describing him as a midranking Islamic State official in the oil-rich province bordering Iraq since the militia became active there.

They said he ran a money-transfer operation for the terror group and was responsible for smuggling medicine and ammunition from Turkey.

They added that relatives of Mr. Abdalhmeed were also involved in Islamic State activities.

Those relatives couldn't be contacted by the Journal.

One of the people approached by the Journal, Mohammad Alalaw, who said he was from Deir Ezzour in Syria but was now in Turkey, said Mr. Abdalhmeed was among the first Syrians who pledged loyalty to Islamic State even before the militia became the dominant force in the region.

He also said Mr. Abdalhmeed was a fighter with the Free Syrian Army until 2013, when he switched sides and pledged loyalty to the extremist group.

Ms. Frodermann said she had no information beyond what was on the website and that it remained to be seen whether the assertions were true.

Mr. Abdalhmeed arrived at the shelter in Unna-Massen on Dec. 2 and was registered first as Leeth Alrjab, said Bettina Jendrusz, deputy head of the Unna-Massen shelter, which is operated by the German Red Cross.

She said it wasn't unusual for migrants to change their names in the course of registering with the authorities and applying for asylum, adding that Mr. Abdalhmeed had yet to give his fingerprints or undergo police checks with the local authorities.

Mr. Abdalhmeed stayed at the refugee center with four family members, Ms. Jendrusz said.

It wasn't immediately clear which of his relatives had traveled with him to Germany. The prosecutor's office said no other arrests were made on Thursday.