BERLIN (Reuters) – German police have arrested three people they suspect recruited Islamists to fight abroad in a nationwide swoop in which documents and computer hardware were also seized. Some 300 police participated in raids of 43 premises in the German states of Baden-Wuerttemberg, Bavaria, Berlin, Hesse and North Rhine-Westphalia, prosecutors in the southern city of Stuttgart said. They believe the suspects, aged 24 to 59, ran recruitment networks that sent over 100 Islamists to fight on foreign battlefields. The recruits were radicalised in Germany with Islamic ideology and were urged to attend militant training camps, the prosecutors said. After the training, some returned to Germany, while others moved elsewhere, including Afghanistan and Pakistan. Meanwhile, in Dusseldorf, one of four Islamists on trial over planned terrorist attacks in Germany admitted on Wednesday that he had attempted to kill a policeman. Daniel Schneider, 24, said he was prepared to accept responsibility for the death of a policeman who he fired at during his arrest in 2007. The skirmish with the officer could have easily "had a deadly ending," he said. Until now, Schneider had repeatedly insisted that he had never intended to shoot at the policeman. He had taken the gun out of the officer's holster and fired a shot, which didn't hit anything. Schneider is the only one of the four so-called Sauerland Group to be accused of attempted murder. His testimony concluded the process of taking evidence, nine months after the trial started. The Sauerland Group, consisting of Schneider, Fritz Gelowicz, Adem Yilmaz and Attila Selek, are accused of planning attacks on US military bases in 2007. They were allegedly acting under the auspices of the Islamic Jihad Union (IJU), often described as a successor to al-Qaeda. The group was apprehended by German special forces after long surveillance, as they were preparing some 730 litres of hydrogen peroxide liquid explosives. Their arrest was bungled, and Schneider was initially able to escape the elite police squad.
