According to the police, a mosque association in Bad Kreuznach in Rhineland-Palatinate is at the center of a raid against members of the banned Islamist group Caliphate State, which has been ongoing since Tuesday morning. There is an urgent suspicion that the ideology of the “caliphate state” is being spread within the association in sermons and through the sale of writings and other means of propaganda and that the organizational structure of the association is being maintained, the State Criminal Police Office said.
In addition, there are said to have been close contacts with a man living in North Rhine-Westphalia, who is said to be the son of the leader of the organization, Metin Kaplan, who lives in Istanbul.
The raid will be carried out in six federal states. Under the leadership of the State Criminal Police Office of Rhineland-Palatinate, three arrest warrants and 47 search warrants have been executed since 6 a.m., the investigating authority in Mainz said.
The 41 accused are suspected of violating a ban on associations. The investigation is being conducted by the general public prosecutor’s offices in Koblenz, Celle and Munich and the public prosecutor’s offices in Düsseldorf, Frankfurt am Main, Karlsruhe and Cologne.
The “Caliphate State” is an Islamist association. According to the investigators, their goal is the establishment of an Islamic state while rejecting democratic and rule-of-law principles on the basis of the Koran as the constitution and Sharia as the only applicable law.
The accused are accused of maintaining the organizational cohesion of the indisputably banned “Caliphate State” association as ringleaders, of participating in it as a member or of having spread propaganda material of this association as a non-member.
