Berlin: German police say they have detained a 22-year old Syrian man who was the subject of a nationwide hunt and is believed to have been preparing a bomb attack.
Police in the eastern state of Saxony tweeted early Monday that Jaber Albakr was detained overnight in the eastern city of Leipzig.
Albakr, from the Damascus area of Syria, escaped the authorities Saturday during a raid of his apartment in nearby Chemnitz.
The raid came after Saxony police were given a tip from Germany's domestic intelligence service that Albakr may be planning an attack.
"Tired but overjoyed: we captured the terror suspect last night in Leipzig," Saxony state police said on twitter.
Police had been looking for the suspect, 22-year-old Syrian refugee Jaber Albakr, since he evaded them during a raid on an apartment in the eastern city of Chemnitz on Saturday.
Police found several hundred grams of explosive in the apartment during Saturday's raid. Albakr had been in Germany since last year and was officially recognised as a refugee, police said at the weekend.
"The overall picture of the investigation, in particular the amount of the explosive found, suggests that the person was planning to carry out an attack," a spokesman for the Federal Prosecutor's Office told broadcaster SWR on Sunday.
The suspicion that a refugee was planning a bomb attack will prove unwelcome news for Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose conservatives have lost support to the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party over her open-door migration policy.
Merkel, who said last month she wished she could “turn back the time by many, many years” to better prepare for last year's influx of almost 1 million migrants, has yet to say whether she will seek a fourth term as chancellor in elections next year.
In July, the Daesh militant group claimed responsibility for attacks on a train near Wuerzburg and at a music festival in Ansbach that wounded 20 people.
