A man, believed to be an “ISIS sleeper agent” has been arrested in Germany over a suspected terror plot during Euro 2024.

The man, Mahmoud A., who is believed to be Iraqi, was taken into custody on Wednesday in the town of Esslingen on the outskirts of Stuttgart after being arrested on suspicion of preparing a terrorist attack on behalf of the terror group.

According to investigators, he arrived in Germany in October 2022, but is believed to have been affiliated with ISIS since 2016.

It’s not yet clear how he managed to gain entry to the country given his alleged links to the group.

Germany’s Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said the arrest showed the nation’s commitment to stamp out the threat posed by ISIS saying: “Our security authorities are extremely vigilant, follow every tip-off and strike hard to protect our country.”

On Tuesday, Germany’s interior ministry had warned at a press conference that the country was “in the crosshairs of jihadist organisations, in particular ISIS and ISIS-K.”

The department said the danger of Islamist terrorism had risen since Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7 and the war in Gaza that followed.

The head of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency (BfV), Thomas Haldenwang, added: “A possible scenario is a large-scale, co-ordinated attack of the kind we recently saw in Moscow.”

He said that ISIS-K, which carried out the attack in Russia, was “certainly the most dangerous group” and had succeeded in “sending its supporters to western Europe, under cover of the refugee exodus from Ukraine”.

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