German suspects had deadline for attacks-report

By Erik Kirschbaum

BERLIN (Reuters) - Three suspected Islamist militants who were planning to attack American targets in Germany had orders to act by Sept. 15 and knew police were hot on their trail before their arrest, a magazine said on Saturday.

The plan was foiled on Tuesday when police arrested two German converts to Islam and a Turk in the biggest German police investigation in the last 30 years.

According to surveillance details published in Der Spiegel magazine, the men had been given a two-week deadline for their planned strikes in a late August call from northern Pakistan that was monitored by German police.

In another detail to emerge on Saturday, a spokeswoman for the Federal Prosecutors Office in Karlsruhe confirmed a Focus magazine report that the suspects had obtained three small used vans in France and brought them to Germany.

The suspected militants, identified by German media as Fritz Gelowicz, Daniel Martin Schneider and Adem Yilmaz, had material to make bombs with power equal to 550 kilograms of TNT and were believed to be planning simultaneous car bombs across Germany.

Authorities were not immediately available to comment on the reported identities of the suspects.

Officials have said all three had trained in militant camps in Pakistan before forming a domestic cell of the "Islamic Jihad Union" -- a little known al Qaeda-affiliated Sunni Muslim group with roots in Uzbekistan.

According to Der Spiegel, two of the militants mentioned "a disco filled with American sluts" along with airports, nightclubs or a U.S. military base as targets during a July 20 conversation that was bugged by police.